Gotta Love Those Whingers

By Jeff Israel

9 Mar 2007

Jeff Israel has some advice for the guys who like to donk off their chips with hands that are easily dominated...

It often seems to me when I’m playing live poker that all my opponents are convinced they are good players who will win over time. Obviously this is mathematically impossible but there is no accounting for ego and so even the worse-than-average players convince themselves that they can beat the game. When they regularly fail to do so, they delude themselves by whingeing that it’s all down to bad luck.

The beauty of this is that losing players always come back for more and because they believe that the only reason they lose is due to bad luck rather than bad play the whingers rarely improve.

In a recent live poker session, I was playing an average size NL holdem cash game with blinds of £2-£5. I had about £350 in front of me which was slightly below the average of around £500. In the big blind I found Td-8d, quite pretty for a blind hand, when four people limped (unusual in this game) and the button raised it £25. The small blind called pretty quickly and I reasoned that, given I h