Wow, why all the vitriol? I said I wasn’t an expert, and was just trying to console the OP and offer my personal tactics and preferences when facing loose opponents. I didn’t mean to offend the SDMB’s legion of poker experts! Are all poker players this nasty? I play the game for fun, I don’t use pokertracker or whatever and pretend I’m fucking Gus Hanson or whoever the expert is.
Show me a player who always wins every hand, please. I’ll be very impressed.
Where does Otto say he’s consistently losing?
I didn’t see that much vitriol, just disagreement with your advice. Keep in mind that when you offer advice to poker players you could cost people real money if your advice is wrong. That applies to all of us, but it helps explain why sometimes people might get a little vociferous when they see bad advice being offered. Poker is a little more serious than just a ‘fun game’, because some people literally have their rent money on the line.
I said I wasn’t an expert, so if someone takes my advice so seriously that they lose money because of it, well, what can I say. I don’t think that the OP is a professional gambler anyway. Weren’t we talking about a low stakes fun game?
Sitting in a low-limit NL ring online on the button, thinking about calling with Q6os with the thought of moving on the pot with a bluffing flop, but decide against it. The blinds get into a pre-flop battle royale (so I wouldn’t have been in anyway). Flop comes 666. I would have flopped the Nuts of Armageddon. Meanwhile, the blinds are merrily whaling away at each other, huge bets raised and called on every street. Turn and river are blanks, come the showdown the SB turns over K7os and loses to the BB’s A-rag.
Then I shot myself in the head.
I had this whole ranting fit lined up and ready to go because I sat very patiently tonight at a live multi, waiting hand after hand after hand to pick up something decent, gritting my teeth as retards called off 60, 70% of their stacks with A6os only to catch two pair on the flop and fill up on the river, swiping a couple small pots from the only other players at the table who knew what the hell they were doing, until after two hours I finally pick up the only pp I see all night (55), push it in short stacked and get busted by pocket 99, when I come home and see the mess described above. I gave up. I stopped trying to understand why ridiculous players make ridiculous plays because I suddenly realized that I will never understand them and that trying to understand them is like teaching the proverbial pig to sing.
About two hands later I wake up with pocket QQ and take away all the money of a guy who thinks pocket 77 is a good hand to re-raise all in with. It’s like the poker gods were waiting for me to have my little epiphany and that hand was my first reward.
You still seem confused about chance.
Your previous statement was: “Yeah yeah I get it, the experts will always be up at the end of the year despite a few bad beats, but saying it’s not a game of chance is crazy.”
I gave examples from chess, bridge and poker to illustrate levels of skill. Even in chess, Kasparov doesn’t win every game (he even loses the odd game). Does that make chess ‘a game of chance’? 
From your comment above, do you consider that only games where the expert wins every time are skill? :eek:
I don’t intend this as vitriol, but I do think you need to expect immediate responses to your incorrect statements on a board dedicated to fighting ignorance.
Most of the mechanics in the game of poker rely on the drawing of the cards, which are completely random. The player has control over what/when/how to bet, and when to fold, which is very little compared to how much the order of the cards determine. Maybe 90% luck was a bit hasty for me to say, but I was saying it mostly to console the OP. I still say it takes more luck than skill to win each individual hand. Nothing will help you if you get bad cards, or even worse, you get good cards which are sucked out by highly improbable hands.
He doesn’t. My statement holds true: if Otto or anybody else is consistently losing, then he’s doing something wrong. That is because poker isn’t a game of chance, which is what you and I are disagreeing about, not whether Otto is losing or not.
No. The cards are entirely secondary. Poker is played with money, not with cards.
I win a lot more than I lose. Does that make me a good player?
Either that, or it makes your opponents very bad players.
Saying that the cards are “entirely secondary” in poker is like saying the puck is entirely secondary in hockey. If poker was played with money, why bother with the cards at all? You could just sit around a table and bet.
You guys are talking at cross purposes anyway. Poker is a game of skill, and it’s a game of chance. There’s nothing contradictory about that, because most games are like that. Some games have no element of chance at all - chess, for instance, or the 100-meter dash - but most do. It’s not insulting your poker skills to admit it’s a game of chance. It’s your skill that weighs the chance in or against your favour and allows you the advantage in the long run. But it’s a game of chance all the same.
Baseball’s a game of chance, too. Nobody would argue it is a game of skill, but chance has a huge impact on results in the short and medium terms, and within a few games results are indistinguishable from sheer luck. Some days the best hitter in the world will go 0-for-4. The best pitcher in the world will give up fourteen hits. Over the long run their skill angles the chances in their favour, but it only improves the chances, it doesn’t eliminate them.
Same with poker. The absolute fact of the matter is that the world’s best poker player could lose to a table of dorks out of sheer bad luck. That’s due to chance. By comparison, the world’s best chess player is not going to lose to a doofus like me, no matter what.
I had a post not too long ago where I told the story of how I flopped quad Queens and lost to a straight flush.
I just mention this for perspective…
If it works for them, it isn’t “ridiculous”. Clearly, there is no “one right and true way” to play Texas Hold 'em. Even the top money players in the USA have said that they have to play differently against different types of players- like in the early portions of a tournement.
What a bizarre statement. Getting into a pissing match pre-flop with a A-rag is certainly ridiculous. Getting into that same match with K7os even more so. An egregiously wrong play doesn’t suddenly become right just because the end result is positive, any more than a right play becomes wrong because the outcome was bad. We’re not talking about good players who mix up their games. We’re talking about cretinous idiots who don’t know what they’re doing but who get lucky more often than they ought to.
Here’s the problem with this discussion.
What possible mechanism, apart from cheating, would let a player get lucky “more than [he] ought to?”
There is no such thing.
In my loss of 4 Qs to a straight flush, I figured that such an event would happen less than once in a thousand trials. That’s not the same as “never,” by a long shot…
I agree that drawing cards is random.
I don’t agree.
You win at poker either by showing the best hand, or by bluffing the other players.
Expert players know the odds, study their opponents habits and have confidence and concentration.
I appreciate you were being kind, but firstly this is serious money business and secondly he doesn’t want consolation!
And your evidence is?
Do you know about varying your play depending on the number of players at the table / your position at the table / the result of the last hand / the other players perception of your betting style etc?
You do know what a bluff is, don’t you?
Well the game may be held up by masked bandits. It’s improbable, but it does cause a loss.
Indeed they are. But the combination of skill + chance adds up to 100%. Chess is 99% skill. Drawing one card each and seeing who’s high is 100% chance.
I already said that having White in a game of chess is an advantage. Look at any grandmaster tournament for proof.
And what odds would you give on the World Champion losing to a dork at a) poker b) chess?
(It’s interesting that you quote a table full of poker players, but only a single chess opponent. How about ‘heads-up’ poker v ‘simultaneous’ chess - do your odds change now?)
Quite possible, but I think I’m playing against the same caliber of opponents everyone else here is.