Are You Serious, or is this Just a Social Occasion?
With the advent of both on-line and Native American Casino action being available almost everywhere these days, the question of whether a person plays “serious” poker or “fun” poker has become an important distinction. There are those who seem to believe any poker game is of the serious variety, and I suppose there is something to be said for the old “Poker Is War,” theory. I personally think playing poker should be fun. Sure, you can have bad beats, players who seem to make every improbable, nay, impossible hand they draw to, and the “I’ve never played this game before,” player who seems to kick everybody’s butt, every single time, but I’ve never understood why other player’s actually get angry about that.
For every one of those games where a person plays tighter than a frog’s butt and gets worked like a runaway step-child, there have been those games where that same person has been the one on the impossible heater. They sure don’t seem to get very mad when it happens for them! I can’t say I haven’t gotten a mite irritated when I’m playing as technically perfect a game as I know how, and some obnoxious inebriated character (loudly) rakes in pot after pot either never even looking at his cards or blearily squints at a Jack-Trey offsuit, and caps the raises before the flop. Naturally the flop always seems to come JJ3, 300 times in a row, just until I play a J3 o/s. Then the flop usually comes out something like A-8-8, the turn hits a Jack and the river is some garbage card that fills in the previously mentioned character’s hand.
At least for the last six games I have played in. Five of them were 3-6 Hold Em games, and one of them was a 4-8 Kill Game. I actually did better at the 4-8 game, but still lost a Benjamin. I was trying to calculate the odds on losing money in six-straight games, where it seemed that every hand turned out second best at the river. Naturally, without a powerful computing program I can screw up my checking account because I can’t even figure out sales tax correctly. Then, while walking along a river rock-strewn path to one of my favorite fishing holes, out in the middle of approximately four square acres of rocks, I found a penny, laying [heads up] in the rocks. It suddenly hit me, that the odds of losing all those games in a row, must be somewhere near the odds of finding a “lucky” penny out in the middle of all those rocks. This led me to the conclusion that there are simply too many variables to calculate without the use of a Cray Main-frame Supercomputer.
Not to mention I got skunked fishing, too. So much for the “lucky penny” theory.
However, all fishing tales aside, the focus of this week’s column is whether or not you are playing poker as a social situation or as a serious attempt to win money. I think most people actually play low-limit games more for fun than profit. To me, low-limit Hold Em is anything between 1-3, to 5-10 games whether they are “kill games” or not. Although a 5-10 kill game can get pretty spendy depending on the action at the table, it is still a low enough limit that “collusionary callers” pose a serious crimp in the bluffing factor. I don’t have a clue as to who may have coined the term “collusion calling” or if it’s something that popped into my head, but it is an important factor in low-limit games.
Whenever I am playing in a low-limit game, I figure the bluff to be almost useless. It can be done, but only rarely will the other players be savvy enough to know when they “should” get out, and almost always there are a few gamblers who are going to take you to the river no mater what they’ve got because a six-twelve-eighteen or even twenty-four dollar call at the river doesn’t scare many gamblers away. Add three zero’s to those numbers and then the average gambler will think long and hard about whether calling with a pair of fours and a Queen kicker may be the best of moves.
Collusion calling seems to be the rule in low-limit games, unless a person sets up a bluff over a fairly long period of extremely tight play, and of utmost importance, position. Although recognized as an important aspect in all poker games, in low-limit Hold Em games, it is my belief that position is the single most important element of all. Any regular poker player can understand that being last to act, gives you a definite edge, since you know what they’ve already been doing, while they have to guess at what you’re going to do.
Naturally, playing the button, or one place (maybe two) to the right of the button are the most favorable position betting stations for the above reason. It is important to recognize the type(s) of players at the table with you. Out of any ten players, you can usually count on at least two of them being calling stations, two more being raising lunatics, four being just “normal” players and at least one being quite good. So, in a social game where winning or losing is not all that important, it is quite fun to try and set up a bluff that actually works. If you do, and it does, never, but never show your bluff cards. Or that will more than likely be the last successful bluff you’ll run in that particular game, and if you frequent the same casino or card room with some of the same players you may have killed your bluff action permanently.
But, then again, especially if you are at a table that you normally don’t play at, and you are having one of those nights where your flops are making sets, quads, nut straights and/or flushes, you might want to wait till you’ve got a completely goofball pair of hole cards, be in last or late position, catch a nothing flop, have the calling stations drop out on a pre-flop raise, keep raising and/or re-raising especially if the “solid players have folded by the turn, then if the bluff works on the river, show the hand. Slam it down with authority and a loud, “Hah!” Do not try this again. Now you need to act a bit more humble, wait for the nuts flop, then raise/re-raise all the way and you will get lots of callers. In fact, there seems to be a certain type of player whose sole function is to be a poker-cop and bust all bluffers. They can be used quite effectively.
On the other hand, if you are playing the game to try to actually feed yourself, this type of play, while useful on occasion, will cost you a lot of money in the long run. Serious play requires a bit different approach. Then a number of elements come into play that the social player never has to learn or use. This requires discipline, memory, mathematical calculation, psychology and much more skill than this writer possesses.
However, there is absolutely nothing wrong with playing the game of poker as a social situation. We have to just face it. The anticipation, the excitement, and the gamut of emotions engendered by fate being determined by the turn of a friendly card, is quite simply, fun. Of course, there are those who consider any form of fun to be wrong. And over the centuries, gambling has had its share of bad press. Then again, so has music, dancing, romance and sex. So my advice is this: if you are playing just for the fun of it, never bring more money to the table than you can afford to lose. You might win, depending on the same factors that allowed me to find a heads-up penny in a rock-strewn river bottom, but you could very well lose your table stake as well. Play hard, play fair, but most of all remember, you are playing. Playing is supposed to be fun. Don’t let anyone else ruin your fun with his or her attitude. You just play your game, have a great time, and above all, enjoy yourself. Life is too short for anything else.
“It Could Be Just Me” by Vincent “Vinny” Setala
October 4, 2006
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