Straight
Join Date: Dec 2007
Posts: 210
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Great post and definitely something everyone should be aware of.
Quote:
3. Bad beats reinforce bad players' bad play.
Unlike other games such as, for example, tennis, poker is a game where looking at results and changing your decision often isn't the right course of action. Say you keep on serving the ball into the net when playing tennis - the corrective action is to change your serve such that you (perhaps) toss the ball a bit higher before hitting it or change the angle at which your racquet makes contact. In poker, say you lose 3 times in a row with AA in an all-in preflop situation, the correct action is obviously not then to fold AA preflop!
In this way, bad beats can reinforce bad players' play because the freak time they hit their runner runner backdoor flush, gutshot draw or second pair when their top pair is outkicked on the flop reinforces the fact that they should chase against the odds because they remember that time they got paid off - without realising that the result of a hand does NOT matter - the only thing that matters is whether the decisions that were made were correct.
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I came across this last night on William Hill. Now it WAS a freeroll but that's the level where it seems most people get their ideas that the online game is rigged et al. There was this one guy who was convinced that Hill was rigged, calling any PF bet with any two cards. He was open to getting all kinds of freaky hands and like posted above, this just reinforced his beliefs. These types of players are both great and annoying to play against but I'm glad they are around.
A.
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