Bad Poker Players

Bad Poker Players

Bad poker players go by many names - donkey, fish, calling station, but at the end of the day they all end up doing the same thing, frustrating poker players who know what they're doing. A bad poker player is a like a light switch, they're either somehow winning while playing losing strategy poker or they're shifting their entire stack over to players who know what they're doing. But at the end of the day, the good players are still stuck shaking their heads at the ridiculous call they just saw some bad player make.

So what exactly makes a bad poker player? Typically its someone who has absolutely zero concept of outs and odds. There are certain draws that are affordable and those which are not. A player who bets the entire size of the pot is expecting to remove any draws from continuing to play. Let's use a fictional scenario here. Let's say that the pot size is 12 and a player bets 12. The total size of the pot is now 24. So a player who decides to stick around in the hand is contributing a total of 33% to that total pot size, not including any previous bets. Another way of saying this would be the player is now getting 2 to 1 on his money. However, even if you are chasing after an ace high flush draw your odds of hitting are only 19% on the turn and the odds against you making your hand are a little over 4 to 1.

Bad players may believe that they are actually getting the right price for the call because the odds of hitting the flush on either the turn or the river is about 35%. However, this is not taking into account what happens if the player does not catch his card on the turn. There is still an additional round of betting. Now if the guy chasing the flush had called the bet of 12 there is now a total of 36 in the pot. If the guy trying to chase away any flushes or straights bets the size of the pot again, the new pot size is 72. The math still remains the same, the call is bad anyway you look at it.

Unfortunately for poker players who understand the odds behind the game, there is a chance that the calling station will actually make his hand. Remember, the odds were 4 to 1 that he wouldn't which means he will every 1 in 5 hands. On a long enough time line the calling station will lose about 80% of the time he does this. But in poker each hand is in its own unit of time. What happens most of the time doesn't happen all of the time.

The only real strategy to play against these bad players if you have a small bankroll is to stop betting so big. You already know it doesn't matter how large of a bet you throw at them before the river card so save yourself some heart ache. Sure, you're going to be losing out on chips in the short run, but the entire idea is to protect your chips from bad breaks. Once you amass a large enough roll, you can move up in levels to where math and odds actually mean something.