Making a stand against bullies

Cash / Marcus Bateman / 01 March 2011 / Leave a Comment

Bullies thrive off of weakness in all genres of life, and the poker table is no exception.

One of the areas that really separates weak players from strong - particularly in loose short-handed and heads up games - is the inability to make a stand early enough to define the game well and keep their opponent off guard. Short-handed poker is a very easy world to get completely run-over in, and being able to fight off attack with marginal hands is key to making your opponent's life hard in.

Put simply, it is very hard to survive in any form of short-handed poker without playing quite a lot of marginal hands. Against very aggressive players, this often means having to play marginal hands in large pots, and a failure to show the ability to do this basically leaves you wide open to total destruction. As the players around you start to realise that you are only playing big pots with very strong hands, they can bully you off basically everything except the very narrow part of your range where you have a monster.

Even when you do have it, you will struggle to get action, as players shut-down in the face of your rare aggression. This is clearly a recipe for disaster in any game, with you losing all the small and middle sized pots, while also very rarely winning a big one. With the constant attrition of the antes that defines all short-handed games, it is critical that you have the skill to stay on top of them,and this invariably means having to making frequent stands to put a brake on the endless bullying that good short handed players employ.

Much like in real life, at some point people's behaviour has to be stood up to before it gets completely out of control. Whether we are stopping an insane dictator invading all of their neighbours, discipling an unruly child, or showing that we will call down a player light at the card table, it is critical that we show what we are capable of early to prevent much worse future consequences. As the old saying goes, a 'stitch in time saves nine', and nowhere could this be more true than when you start to get run-over by loose aggressive players in short games.

Bullies thrive off of weakness in all genres of life, and the poker table is no exception. That player who seems to just be unrelentingly pounding on you all game will often seem a totally different animal after a few well timed calls or re-bluffs, and showing that you are not just a punch bag full of free money is usually your key priority in short games full of loose and aggressive players.

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