Seriously? EVERY hand? With your pocket unsuited 2-6? And when you’re questioned about it, you say, “It makes things go faster”?? Why are you bothering to play if you just want to get things over as quickly as possible? Thanks for making the game totally unenjoyable.
I assume you’re talking about freeroll games, with no money involved?
The thing is, because these games are free, a good proportion of the players take none of the usual considerations when playing their hands. They simply go all-in early in an attempt to build a big chip stack, and if they miss, then they just move on to the next freeroll tourney.
When i played freerolls, i would make it a habit never to play the first few hands. I even sometimes passed with AA or KK, because if there are four or five other people seeing the flop every hand, your chances of winning are pretty poor even if you have a good hand.
If, on the other hand, these are games for real money, you should thank your lucky stars. While idiots like this will probably beat you once in a while, in the long run you’ll take their money off them.
I played on online freeroll tournament once where six of the ten players went all in pre-flop on the first hand. I think the best hand was K-8.
At least five morons were eliminated early.
I always let these assholes beat themselves. If you can get a table with 3-4 of them, all the better, don’t play those hands. When the wild fucks are eliminated, play your best tight poker and make the survivor have to open up again. If you can’t beat a wild fuck, you need to practice some more.
Just sayin’
SSG Schwartz
Yeah, it’s freeroll, but it’s the online poker on the iPhone, and unfortunately every day the chips replenish, and if they want to pay a meager fee, anyone can get a pretty good sum of chips every day. If I have $17,000 in chips, I enter the table with maybe $2,000 to buy in, as does everyone else. If All-In has saved up a bunch of chips, I’m in for a long session of waiting for the moron to lose, and since most everyone will fold when he goes All In, he ends up “winning” the blinds only, so the only recourse (which I admit is not exactly hard to do) is to leave the table and hope that the game doesn’t drop you back on that table when you re-enter the game.
The only problem in situations like this, of course, if that the sixth guy now has a stack of 60,000 chips to bully around everyone else on the table. Which is precisely why these asssholes go all-in from the beginning in the first place; they’re not good players, so they need a bigger stack to compete.
I know that playing someone with a bigger stack than you is a skill everyone should learn, but in a no-limit tourney you can quickly watch your stack decline while you wait for the opportunity to win some hands against the asshole who drops 10,000 in the pot every hand. Bluffing is pointless, because these guys can’t be bluffed, so you have to wait for a really good hand.
I suppose it’s part of the weakness of freeroll; without real money at stake, who really cares if you go all in on K-8, right? And if the flop gives you K-K-8 all of a sudden you’re a god! Eh, whatever. The strength of freeroll is the same as the weakness; at least it’s not real money.
Dude, if you have AA, you want everybody to go all in.
True enough. But somehow, the online poker gods are different than the real life poker gods, and your A-A is going to lose to All-In’s unsuited 3-7 when the flop turns out to be 3-7-K and the turn is 4 and the river is 3. It’s like some unwritten online poker law.
Well, sort of.
I can’t remember the exact numbers, but even AA doesn’t win all the time, and if you have five or six callers (instead of one or two) seeing the flop, you dramatically increase the odds that some schlub with nothing will draw a set or a straight or a flush.
The odds of any one of those guys beating your AA are very small, but the odds that one of the six will beat you are actually pretty damn good. And there’s no prize for finishing second in the hand.
The curious aspect of Hold’Em is that novice/bad players are actually harder to play against than pros, because they don’t bet as predictably based on their hands.
That’s probably why though. They don’t want to PLAY, they just want to use the $1000 they get that day see if they can hit a huge hand. If they can, add it to the bankroll. If not, try again tomorrow.
I play a lot of online poker. I stopped playing for money a couple years ago, too many bad beats, and I have anger issues I haven’t resolved yet. The play money is ridiculous though, it’s very hard to find a good game. I lose with pocket aces at least 25% of the time because of the above mentioned reasons.
It kinda reminds me of those stock market simulation games where you invest play money and compete with thousands of other people. On the surface, a reasonable person might study things and pick 15 or 20 companies which he she thinks are solid and positioned to grow. Certainly one would choose a strategy like that if investing substantial real money.
But when you think about it, a better strategy is (arguably) to pick one extremely risky stock and go all in. For example, put it all into a bank which is teetering on the edge of insolvency. It seems to me that improves one’s chances of winning the game.
You’re absolutely right that there’s no prize for second place but
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It’s a freeroll and the first hand at that. It literally costs you neither time nor money to get in there with a superior hand and take your chances
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Even if it weren’t a freeroll, even if it weren’t the first hand, you should still get in there. AA is the best hand you can have. With four opponents, no you’re not guaranteed to win. In fact, more often than not you’ll lose. But - and here’s the key - the chances of you winning are far greater than anyone else in the hand. You will win more often than any other person in the hand.
I could explain this in more detail than this if you want, but it’s been hashed out repeatedly on poker message boards. In 99.999% of cases you want to call multiple all-ins with AA.
I’ve seen all the arguments, and i agree that there’s merit to them.
I also know, for example, that even if your odds of winning the hand with AA are less than 50%, the pot odds make it worthwhile with a lot of callers. You might be a 2 to 1 underdog to win the hand, but with a bunch of callers you’re getting 4 or 5 to 1 on your money. If you spend your whole poker career taking 2-1 shots on 5-1 money, you’ll end up a rich poker player.
You’re also right about the freeroll. It costs you no money or time to call these all-in douchebags if you have AA. But when i played freerolls, i tried the best i could to play as if the chips were real money, in an effort to improve my skills. I didn’t want to simply go all-in against five callers before the flop on the first hand, because that almost never happens in real money games.
And as for real money games, as i said above, i agree that there are very good arguments to be made for calling a bunch of all-ins with AA. But if, for example, i’ve just forked over $10,000 to enter the World Series of Poker, and taken the time to fly to Las Vegas to play, i’m very unlikely to throw every chip i have into the pot against five callers on the first hand, because even though my pot odds are awesome, i still have a considerably greater than 50 percent chance of being the first person to pack my bags. And that would really suck.
I always just sit out the first dozen or so hands until the idiots eliminate themselves. Actually, this is a pretty good idea for any form of poker, until you start talking about big real money pots.
Quite true; unfortunately, playing the game drains the iPhone’s battery pretty quickly, so I’m not getting much enjoyment out of simultaneously watching idiots go all in on every hand AND draining my battery waiting for them to get bored and wander off. The best solution I’ve had so far is to exit the game, then re-enter until I find a table with people who are pretending that they’re playing for real money.
Yeah, but you’d have a good chance to have enough chips where you could mostly sit the rest of the day out and only play great starting hands. I understand the emotional response of not wanting to risk everything right away, but as far as expected value goes, unless you are a much much better player than everybody else, calling would be the best move.