Views from the Rail

Woot! Over 1000 views on my fledgling blog! I’m not sure if that’s good, but it seems like a nice milestone. I’ve had a lot of fun updating you guys about my life and my thoughts on various things about poker. I hope you continue to read.

Anyway, I thought I’d talk a little bit about how we treat and especially how we think about our opponents. I’ve spent a lot of time over the last 4 years both playing poker and commenting in poker forums. Over these years, I’ve seen a common trend in good, but not great players. They don’t respect their opponents.

I’m not simply talking about people who use the term “fish”. While I do find this problematic and will talk a bit about it specifically at the end of this post, I also find it instructive that these players continually underestimate their opponents in different ways. For example, a hand post on 2p2 might say something like “A terrible player opens in MP and I threebett AA next in…”.

Already I can make some conclusions about hero in the hand. First of all, he isn’t great at getting into his opponent’s head. I don’t mean this in the sense of the leveling or metagame. I mean that he doesn’t understand his opponent’s motivations for playing the way he does. Related to this, he doesn’t understand that there are different kinds of bad players. He may even mistakenly think a very good player is terrible because he plays differently from all the “good” players he knows.

The word “fish” isn’t bad in and of itself. But, oftentimes, it is indicative of a player who doesn’t think about what kind of players he’s playing against, who doesn’t understand exactly how to adjust to different kinds of opponents. Furthermore, the word indicates a level of disrespect for one’s opponents and an overvaluation of one’s worth as a player. Let’s face it: at one point or another, all of us have been the “fish” in a poker game. We should show more respect to people who may have much more potential than we “experts”; at the very least, they’re paying our salary.

I’m not saying I’ve never used the term “fish”. I’ve certainly talked about “terrible” regs with players I respect. But these are things I strive to avoid.

One last point: we shouldn’t deride our opponents, whether they are good or bad, for the simple reason that we’re all human beings. Most of us are very good at something. Some of us are good at lots of things. But our talent or hard work doesn’t give us the right to look down on another person. It may sound like a bad folk song, but, in my book, respecting one another is one of the most important human qualities. So the next time you start an “idiot list” or talk to your friends about “the worst player ever”, keep in mind that thinking about what they’re doing and why they’re doing it is not only smart. It’s also good.