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Bad Poker Players, Good Poker Players, and Pot Odds

A bad poker player consistently puts money into the pot with hands whose expected value is less than the amount of money in the pot. Expert players refer to this as “chasing”. A bad player chases with hands that won't win often enough to justify the cost of his chase. Perhaps unfortunately, the bad player’s chase is occasionally successful, and when his chase succeeds, he often wins a huge pot. This happens just often enough to lure him into chasing again.

There are three possible reasons that a player chases. The most obvious reason is, of course, poor poker skills. Perhaps a particular player simply can’t properly evaluate the true worth his hand, and, as a result, consistently overvalues mediocre holdings. In this case the player would be likely to call or even raise when the correct play would be to fold. In time, such a player will most likely learn when not to chase and may eventually become a skilled player himself who wins money from bad players who chase -- as he once did.

Not infrequently, a bad player is one who simply enjoys the gaming action. He doesn’t care whether his play is good or bad. He is having fun and he is willing to pay for his entertainment with a probable loss at the tables. He will continue until the game is no longer fun. This usually occurs when, at some future point, he notices that he doesn’t have money for other activities that are also fun due to his losses at poker.

Another possibility, and perhaps the most likely, is that the bad player knows, or at least has the sense, that he might be chasing and is thereby throwing away money but lacks the personal discipline to stop himself from doing so. In extreme cases, such a player has a gambling problem and should not be playing at all. Unfortunately, this kind of player is usually incapable of controlling himself and, too often, he will stop only when he can no longer afford to continue. At such times the player’s personal situation may well be desperate.

In contrast, a good poker player never chases. It is true that there are times when it is correct for a player to continue when he may not have the best hand. This occurs when the player believes he may be, at present, holding the worse hand, but calculates that, in relation to the size of the pot, the probability of his hand improving to become the winner is good enough to merit continuing. This is not chasing; it is the poker equivalent of a good investment. Nevertheless, a good player is always very judicious about such plays.

A good player characteristically folds early a high percentage of the time. Before the pot becomes too large, a good player will usually fold if there is even a reasonable possibility that he doesn't have the best hand. To less knowledgeable players this may seem "chicken", but good players know that it is a long way to the River (the last betting round) in any form of poker with a second best hand.

It is true that good players are often bluffed out early by bad players. However, good players don't automatically fold to bluffs and the occasional loss incurred when a good player makes an incorrect early fold in the face of a bluff bet or raise from a bad player is more than recouped by the many more times when the bad player tries to bluff but the good player happens to be holding much better cards with no intention of folding.

Every good poker player shares the ability to accurately weigh the chances that his hand will be the winner against the amount of money to be gained from the pot. Experts refer to this as calculating the “pot odds”. It is this ability that differentiates players in skill and ultimately determines whether a player is predator or prey at a poker table.

Even a player who is very new to poker, with little strategic knowledge, can do well if he has the innate ability to estimate pot odds reasonably accurately. Such a player is often said to have a good “card sense” or, more generally, a talent for the game, and his long-term prospects are usually quite good.

The skills of the good players may seem, at first glance, to far outstrip the skills of bad players. A good player is usually confident and comfortable at the table and is generally seated behind large stacks of chips that seem to have the permanence of well known mountain ranges. A bad player, on the other hand, is usually far less comfortable and is very often actually unhappy at the table. His stacks of chips ebb and flow like sand dunes in a windstorm. He seems to be constantly rebuying and no matter how many chips he has in front of him he knows they can and very likely will disappear in the next few hands.

Nevertheless, this difference in skill may not be as great as it first appears. With just a little more attention to pot odds versus the actual value of his hand, the bad player could very quickly close this gap in skills and find himself suddenly transformed from prey into predator.