I've read these boards for a while now and other various poker sites, played a lot of poker online with marginal success, and read several books and lots of information on other sites, and i feel i'm a fairly decent NL Hold'em player at this point. I can hold my own against another player of my skill or better, but for some reason when i play home games with some of my friends here at school- i find myself losing way more than i should. Good hands that I raise with before the flop typically see 4 or sometimes more callers with garbage to mediocre hands, and almost inevitebly will not hold against all 4. The majority of them will call pot sized bets with things like gut shot strait draws...Trying to explain things like pot odds gets me no where. I can't tell you how many times i've made a 5$ raise at a 5$ pot (with a 3 card gap on the board) with something like trips or two pair, only to have it shot down by someone who called with a gut shot strait draw and hit it. Having 1 fish at a table is a dream come true...but playing against 5 is almost impossible. If any of you have ever played regularly against these kind of players i'd be interested to know how you beat them.