LMAO!!!!!!
1. They might get violent???? in a room full of cameras and security guards and honestly I WISH some of the idiots I played with would give me the opportunity to put my hands on them.

2.They will play better??? So we should all strive to go on tilt...because it will improve our games ..SMH!

3. I would never slow roll or Hollywood anyone! BUT, if me showing them that I got them to lay down the best hand pisses them off..SO BE IT!

I swear you guys will try to make an argument against ANYTHING I say! LMAO, keep it up, its amusing!

There was someone assaulted at the Commerce a few weeks ago. I used to play at Taj Majal, there was a fight there that ended in death. Bad stuff does happen.

A number of years back, I was playing 9/18 at Commerce when someone pulled a knife at 1/2 stud table over a $35 pot.

Stuff happens.

When loose passive players tilt, they become better players because they're less predictable and more aggressive.

This is meh. See #2.

That's usually what happens when someone is consistently wrong.

When title of thread suggests a friendly, loose, easy game......

When loose passive players tilt, they become better players because they're less predictable and more aggressive.

And that's bad? A weak fish putting more money in pot with hands they shouldn't be playing in first place? Putting in extra bets in bad spots? Understand I don't strive to put people on Tilt, same way I don't angle shoot, but if it happens its not a bad thing! Understand whats going on and make adjustments!

That's usually what happens when someone is consistently wrong.

LMAO you mean right not wrong...last few debates in here, I've OBVIOUSLY been the winner!

A number of years back, I was playing 9/18 at Commerce when someone pulled a knife at 1/2 stud table over a $35 pot.

Once again...I WISH! the fools I play with would give me an opportunity to LEGALLY put my hands on them...not afraid of anything jumping off at table or outside of casino...hell cut my teeth at the normandie, and that place was like the wild wild west!

Yup. Anything that causes a player to move towards a better game style makes it harder for you to win money from them. If a player that's playing too passively is suddenly more aggressive, your EV is almost certainly going to decrease. If a predictable player becomes less predictable, then your EV is almost certainly going to decrease.

This is pretty elementary stuff.

Obviously was written in caps. It must be true.

Don't provoke him, I heard he cut his teeth at Normandie.

I'm surprised that Aaron can't remember a time when bluff catching HU on the river IP where the opponent bets and we call and he says, "you got it" but was bluffing with the best hand. That happened to me often when I'd first started playing live after a break from live where I played exclusively online poker. Online it would be a standard A or Khi call down, but in live poker, poor players often bluff with hands that are too strong to be bluffing with. I quickly realized that I needed to start turning my worst bluff catchers into bluffs.

I've always disagreed with callipygian and lawdude's idea of fast rolling the river last to act when an opponent has bet and says, "I missed" or "you got it" or if they've checked and we check back. Using that as a hard and fast rule is problematic IMO for two main reasons.
1. You miss out on information (sometimes free info and often information you've paid for) and
2. You give away information unnecessarily in situations like my above example where you're bluff catching with a hand worse than the hand they've chosen to bluff with.
Sure it's fine to do in the right circumstances for all the reasons they suggest, but to do it by default isn't optimal.

Here's an example, I'm playing 20/40 with theDarkKnight the other day. He doesn't know who I am because I'm from out of town and this is the first time we've played together. I've figured out who he is because he has a Batman head card protector.

Folds to him on BTN, he raises, SB folds and I defend the BB with J♦️4♥️.

A♦️T♦️3♣️
I check, he bets, I say, "if I have one diamond I'm raising." I look down at my cards and then raise. He calls

Q❤️
I bet, he raises, I call

5♦️
I check, he says, "I have AJ"

I think he missed out on an opportunity to gain some valuable information about a player in his game that may be tough to play against. I'd want to have all the information I could have in that situation. I asked, "Don't you want to see my hand?" I don't remember his response, but later, after he'd changed seats to be on my left and we started talking, he referenced this thread as his reason for verbally fast rolling his hand. It's only after reading this post that he knows what my hand was.

I guess for clarity, the process suggested by this thread is that he checks behind, THEN you say "You've got it", THEN he tables his hand.

Sometimes, but most of the time not. The information you get is often muddled and inconclusive. Let's say that you tabled J4o. So he knows you'll defend widely. Is that something he wouldn't have figured out anyway?

Are you thinking about the flop check-raise? What information is gained there? You said you would do it if you had a diamond, and you have a diamond.

But what I would say here is that there's a chance to sow confusion and create questions about your play by showing it. The next time you are in that situation, maybe you say something similar. He *still* doesn't know that you've got the thing you've declared.

It looks like he figured out what he needed to know without seeing your hand. And that's what happens most of the time. That one showdown tends not to be super-critical to understanding your opponent. And very often, a disproportionate emphasis will be put on that particular hand (because psychology).

Let's dig into this. As a percentage of your total showdowns, how many fall into this category? If it was often, you realized it quickly, and if you fixed it quickly, the number of hands you "mistakenly" showed is low.

I don't think anyone has ever advocated that you do this as a hard and fast rule. As a matter of fact, in other threads, I've explicitly spelled out the scenarios I'd make exceptions for - I'm giving each opponent one free swipe at me, if they show up with a better hand after saying "you got it" is one scenario. The other common scenario is where I am not the last aggressor, like if I semibluffed the turn and got 3-bet, and then whiffed on the river and my opponent donk checked.

How about this, you suggest when it's appropriate to do, and if those scenarios cover >50% of the time it comes up, then let's just say we can call it "default" by virtue of it being what you do the most.

Earlier in the thread someone suggested what I think you're suggesting - never show unless the hand is obvious or you were the last aggressor. I pointed out that those two exceptions constitute the majority, not minority, of cases.

If you want to continue to play poker legally, you had best avoid violence and avoid scenarios where violence is involved. The people who run poker rooms, and the police, really don't care how tough a guy you are. They just don't like violence very much.

Aaron and I have often disagreed over the years, but I think he is 100 percent stone cold right here.

People who want to see people's hands highly overstate the value of single pieces of information. It isn't that you can never learn anything by seeing one hand, but most of the time, it either (1) confirms something you should have already known or (2) provides a small piece of information that you are likely to learn soon enough anyway. And every once in awhile, it actively misleads you. (For instance, guy sits down at the table and soon raises 92 offsuit, bets 3 streets and shows it down. You see that hand and say "aha! he's a maniac!". Nope, his daughter was born February 9. )

Meanwhile speeding up showdowns is immensely valuable to good players, because you play more hands and also because you give other players the chance to muck hands they don't want to show, thereby encouraging them to continue to overbluff you.

No, that's one situation that I mentioned, but it's not specific to the example I offered.







He may or may not figure out that I defend widely sometime during the course of our session together. It depends on many factors one of which is how often we end up in that situation. In a soft 20/40, it's not often folded to the button. Had he checked behind, not declared his hand and given me the opportunity to show my hand, he'd figure out something about my play, (that I defend widely vs a BTN open), that he may or may not figure out later, but this way, he'll figure it out immediately. Gaining information quickly is important when you have limited time with a new opponent. Wouldn't you agree that the speed of gained information is part of what makes online players better on average than live players?

I'm talking about the whole hand. If he gets to see my hand, he'll realize that I'm either a tough player or a spewy fish and can adjust accordingly.



I'm not what you're trying to say here.







What makes you think he figured anything out? What information did I give you to make that assumption?

If this is the case, there's not that much value in knowing that you defend a wide range of hands because it won't come up that often.

No. Online players are better because they regularly play tougher opponents. That forces them to be better/more sophisticated or they go broke really quickly (because of the higher volume of hands). Online players also have access to tools that give them raw information (stats) to act on.

As I said before, I think the value of that information is overrated.

But which one are you?? That's kind of the point I'm making. The information from this specific hand is quite weak.

Let's say the next time you're in a defense situation, you say something something similar. Because you said you would raise with a diamond and did that, does that mean that this next time you must be telling the truth and you've definitely got whatever it is you're saying you've got? Maybe preflop you say, "If I've got an ace, I'm 3-betting you." Should he believe you because of the J4o hand?

This:

Unless the game was super-loose-passive, you generally want position on better/aggressive players. And that's where he went.

(If the game is super-loose-passive, you want to be ahead of the aggressive player because then you'll have the first shot at the dead money in the pot.)

Personally, I don't enjoy debating all that much, which is why I haven't responded to callipygian or lawdude, so I'm not interested in continuing this debate much further. I agree with some of the stuff you've said and disagree with others. However, I do want to nitpick on one tiny thing.

I asked if you'd agree that PART of the reason online players are better is because they get information faster. You really don't think that's part of why they're better? I agree with you with the other reasons you have for why, but find it hard to believe that you wouldn't recognize the speed of information gain as a catalyst for improvement.

We might be talking about two completely different things here. This was your original statement:

Your "as a catalyst for improvement" is an interesting statement to throw into the mix.

I'm saying that an online player seeing your J4o hand and a live player seeing your J4o hand probably gain the same amount of information on average from seeing the hand. I don't think that online players have any inherent "speed" advantage from being online players instead of live players in this respect.

However, here are other things that you could also be saying:

* Online players will learn more from the J4o hand than live players because online players are better. (I agree that online players are generally better than live players. But there's a lot of self-selection bias going on here, and I don't immediately conclude that the information gain is necessarily faster on a per-hand basis because of anything specific to online poker being online. The general poker sophistication of online players has more to do with player attitudes towards online poker compared to live poker. There are far more "social casual" live players that are there just to hang out with people and have fun. The online poker world does not have as many of those people.)

* Online players learn faster because they see a higher volume of hands total. Someone who has played online for 10 hours and seen thousands of hands has more information than someone who has played live for 10 hours and seen a couple hundred hands. In this sense, they "get information faster." (This is probably generally true, but I will also say that back when the US played poker there were TONS of online donks playing TONS of hands.)

* Online players learn faster because the games are tougher, so they have to adjust more quickly. (There's a bit of survivorship bias here. I don't think that online players necessarily learn any faster/better on a per-hand basis. But the rate of hands dealt per hour does mean that players go busto a little faster than they might live.)

So.... maybe? I don't know.

None of those things. But I totally understand now why my statement is vague and confusing. Let me clarify.

Forget the J4o hand completely.

When playing online you and I are HU on the river, you check, I bet, you call. I show my hand and the software mucks your hand because I have the winning hand. The next hand plays out and I click the "last hand" button to see the hand replay and I can see what you have. Live players don't have this same opportunity. Well, technically they do, but it's considered to be bad etiquette. In that case, an online player has access to information about the hands their opponents choose to play and how they play them that a live player doesn't. In a live situation like the above it could take months before he/she gains the same information that the online player will have after a few hours.

To answer the question in the OP, show or don't show. I don't think it matters much either way in lower limit games.

Since you don't like debating, let me just ask this: how has that worked out for online poker? Is it filled with friendly, loose, easy games?

What you're looking for is basically like a critical mass of hands. Seeing 2-3 hands doesn't give you that much information. You probably need to see 5-70 hands before you have enough information to start to discern patterns. You can certainly reach the critical mass of hands faster in an online setting where you can see showdown hands than when you don't get to see showdown hands. (You also have 100% accurate recall of the hands, which is probably at least as important as seeing the showdown cards.)

But (keeping things on point for the thread) in a live context, you're probably not playing HU. And the number of times that you have some sort of situation where your opponent declares you win even though the protocol is for him to show is really quite small. So the marginal improvement of forcing your opponent to show still isn't that much.

So you're not wrong about being able to see showdown hands having value. But in the context provided, I still don't think it's really all that important or damaging to your understanding of your opponent if a couple hands slip through.