How to deal with nonsensical players

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cifacia

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Hi again,

I am far from being a good player and still am very much of a beginner, but I am trying hard to learn and use what I learn while I play. However I feel like at micro stakes I find players that not just play badly, but act really in a nonsensical fashion and I am not sure how to deal with.

Last table I lost there was opponent, with stack well above average of the table at around 120BB, that went all in for 4 straight hands, always as a re-raise and most of the time off position. Two of these went on the show down

First shown was a 4 2, second one was a T6.

After this 4 hands oppo is around 80BB.

I (50BB) am now BTN, have AK, I raise 4BB against two limpers, the oppo above is SB.

Oppo re-raise all in. Given the information I had from hands above I know he basically shoves everything, so I call.

He shows T3.

Of course he flops double pair and I lose the hand.

I am aware that if I make this play 1000 times, I will win ~700 of them, but it is a bit disheartening when I am trying to learn.

In the process of learning how to play better, should I just plain avoid interacting with these players even if most of the time my equity is good? I feel like I cannot apply any reasoning I am learning in situations like this.

Now this is a very extreme cases where villain shoved very often, but I encountered often similar behaviour with 3bets or sizeable raises instead of plain all-in, but still with an unreadable range of hands.

How is best for me to deal with these players given that I am currently trying to optimize for learning rather than winning?
I feel like that the logic I am learning does not apply in situations like this. How can I exploit those? Or shall I for the time being steer away?
 
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xrhstos

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Maybe you need to rephrase your question to: How do you deal with variance in poker?
You have to accept that you won't always win all ins when ahead and won't always lose when behind.
It will feel unbalanced but that's just your perception of bad luck weighting on your potential suck outs on others.

You made a correct decision based on your opponent going all in preflop with a very wide range deep stacked (which is a terrible play), and you called with a very tight range.
If you are happy with how you played a hand that means that you probably played it correctly.
You're doing a great job of applying what you have learned, keep it up.
 
tw082

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Hi again,

I am far from being a good player and still am very much of a beginner, but I am trying hard to learn and use what I learn while I play. However I feel like at micro stakes I find players that not just play badly, but act really in a nonsensical fashion and I am not sure how to deal with.

Last table I lost there was opponent, with stack well above average of the table at around 120BB, that went all in for 4 straight hands, always as a re-raise and most of the time off position. Two of these went on the show down

First shown was a 4 2, second one was a T6.

After this 4 hands oppo is around 80BB.

I (50BB) am now BTN, have AK, I raise 4BB against two limpers, the oppo above is SB.

Oppo re-raise all in. Given the information I had from hands above I know he basically shoves everything, so I call.

He shows T3.

Of course he flops double pair and I lose the hand.

I am aware that if I make this play 1000 times, I will win ~700 of them, but it is a bit disheartening when I am trying to learn.

In the process of learning how to play better, should I just plain avoid interacting with these players even if most of the time my equity is good? I feel like I cannot apply any reasoning I am learning in situations like this.

Now this is a very extreme cases where villain shoved very often, but I encountered often similar behaviour with 3bets or sizeable raises instead of plain all-in, but still with an unreadable range of hands.

How is best for me to deal with these players given that I am currently trying to optimize for learning rather than winning?
I feel like that the logic I am learning does not apply in situations like this. How can I exploit those? Or shall I for the time being steer away?
Short answer if your trying to learn how to play poker online poker is a bad place to learn. If your trying to learn how to play online poker that's different in my opinion. One reason using your case as an example players shoving constantly regardless of cards and winning repeatedly no matter how many opponents is an online phenomenon. You will never see this work or even attempted live while I've seen it work a multitude of times online.

Not much you could do there in my opinion you played it right. I try to avoid shoving in most situations because it takes everything out of your hands and puts it to chance. If I do call a shove it's rarely without pockets. However when someone is shoving with any two constantly AKs would be the type of hand I'd be waiting for to try and take them down.

That's really all I know to do in this situation where someone is shoving every time. Wait for a high% hand and take advantage of their aggression. I have not been playing a real long time myself and when I was first learning I would try to avoid all overly aggressive players unless I had a great hand. Just now starting to feel comfortable going up against them hand for hand but still only if I'm hot and have been catching good hands consistently.

I personally stopped playing AK so much when I first started using a hud and looked back to see what hands I was losing with the most and AK was by far my #1 losing hand when it came to chip loss. It's hard to lay them down but at same time they could lose to a pair of two's. With players constantly shoving with low and mid-range pockets it makes AK a difficult hand to play. It;s one of my least favorite hands for this reason I'm not saying it's one of my least favorite hands to play. I just mean overall it causes me more stress than most hands. It's a minefield out there especially at the micro level. Good Luck to you in your future play!:top:
 
EvertonGirl

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You know the basics and that's good, you also understand that you can't win them all, if poker was that easy, it would be boring lol.

All you got to do is work on your emotions, hard to do I know, but once you learn how to play with no emotions and carry on studying poker, then you will be a winner in the long run
 
tw082

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Maybe you need to rephrase your question to: How do you deal with variance in poker?
You have to accept that you won't always win all ins when ahead and won't always lose when behind.
It will feel unbalanced but that's just your perception of bad luck weighting on your potential suck outs on others.

You made a correct decision based on your opponent going all in preflop with a very wide range deep stacked (which is a terrible play), and you called with a very tight range.
If you are happy with how you played a hand that means that you probably played it correctly.
You're doing a great job of applying what you have learned, keep it up.
Why should they change the name of post? This player was obviously being nonsensical and if not for this the variance would not have been an issue. Not to mention there are probably 100 threads with the title how to deal with variance or something of the like already on this forum. I just don't like how you started off trying to correct them for something that did not need a correction. Sure there are a 100 different titles they could have chose but they chose this one and it works perfectly for the situation described.:D
 
D

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Nice early post cifacia.

We all understand your frustration and have been there. tw082 is on point regarding this being something prevalent online and at this level. In fact I am constantly baffled by nonsensical play as I cannot imagine playing in such a manner. I still get floored, shocked, bamboozled day in and out.

The only way to build a coping mechanism is deep experience. To play countless hands where your confidence grows because your fundamentals are correct. On any given day you can anticipate a bad beat because of a clown play sometimes winning out. However in the longer term you will see your results are positive if your basics are all in order.
 
Matt_Burns88

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I feel your pain as I come across these players regularly and used to lose my cool all the time, but you have to learn to embrace these feckless idiots that want to punt off their chips. Sure, you lost this one, but what would you do next time? Fold? I don't think so. You're a 69.4% favourite to win against him, and judging from the rest of your post, you're not often going to be in a much worse shape. So you're going to get it in with AKs every time and overall you will crush this guy.

What do you do? Simple. You tighten up your range a bit so that when you get it in, you're virtually guaranteed to be ahead I would suggest something like AQo+, ATs+ and TT+ to call his all ins and you can be sure that you will almost always be ahead.

Good luck.
 
Nathan Williams

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Like others have alluded to, these types of players are actually the entire reason why we play the game. They're long term loss-rates are the highest of all player types and this means that (on average), you will win more from these players than anyone else.

The best thing you can possibly do is get in as many hands with them as possible by raising up their limps and value betting the living daylights out of them. There is no point in bluffing, so just give up when you don't hit the board by the turn or the river.

And most importantly of all, you need to keep your cool when they are hitting their miracle cards. This is just math, it will happen sometimes. Focus on the process, not the results of individual hands. This is how winning player think.
 
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