No, I just like to see the game played properly. For players who don't know they're supposed to show first when called, it really doesn't bother me. But the ones who DO KNOW, and who take pleasure in repeatedly trying to get away with it, they bother me.

They want to withhold information, while learning something about me and my cards. I want their information. I paid for the information. Give it to me. Or muck.

Because I'm within my rights to do so. It's not "my protocol". It's the freaking rule of the game of poker!

Yeah, And it's perfectly within his rights to stall and irritate you.

To everybody else, you're both holding it up. It takes two to tango.

To everybody else, this is "you show first!" crap, the exact thing you said you didn't want at a casino. You have complete control over showing your cards.

Please re-read my post. I'm not going to let the repeat offenders get away with doing it again and again and again. The newbies I don't worry about.

As far as holding up the game, I have an infinite amount of patience when I'm out of the hand and others are playing, thinking, whatever. I'm going to see and play thousands of hands this year. I can afford to wait while others play theirs however they see fit. I expect the same courtesy. If you're in such a big rush for players to show their hands and move on to the next one, perhaps you don't have the best attitude for this game.

I said I wanted to defend my right to wait for a showdown WITHOUT being called blah blah blah, which you just did. So you did deny my right.

As for knowing peoples ranges etc etc. If that was true, I would not have a calling range on the river, unless I was calling a shove. By your definition of a good poker player, everyhand would end in a shove on the river because we are so confident of our read.

Further, I don't do it for information. 1st its to stop the other douche from playing the showdown game, and 2nd its to discourage people from bluffing me.

And if you guys get so upset about a 10-20 second pause at the showdown....what about all the tank-folding, tank-calling etc during each hand and on every street?

Not that its relevant to this thread, but the bolded is just wrong. Imagine a situation where you "know" your opponent has 1 hand that beats you and 10 that you beat.. If you call its obviously +EV. But suppose you know he folds everything you beat if you shove. Then there is no shove.

As to the rest, YOU are playing the showdown game by refusing to follow the suggestion that expected winners show. And second, you really don't want to discourage people from bluffing you at those stakes. They are really bad at it and its very profitable for them to try.

And yes, don't worry, I think the people that take forever to do something no matter what are also bad for the game.

Truthfully, I want you to come back and read these posts once you have been around the block a few more times. That's not intended to be insulting but I feel confident that if you were to do that you would likely much better understand what pfapfap is saying.

As time (and your poker career) goes on, you start understanding that the other players are your customers and that you should be extending as many privileges as you can to keep the game fun and light and moving along. This isn't done to keep the 'regular' in the hand happy but rather the 3-4 fish that are potentially getting uncomfortable. The game has suddenly become slightly more antagonistic. There are people making frowny faces. It's not as fun anymore.

Poker isn't specifically about winning today, it's about setting up situations that allow you to win for months and years to come. Sometimes this may cost you a miniscule amount of EV but pays for itself over and over again as people return to the tables and add more money to the poker economy over and over again.

Think of poker as a business. If you have a multitude of places that offer the same products for the same prices, it's usually the customer service and the 'extras' that a certain store does or has that makes it successful. Some of us here strive to keep 'customers' happy and in our store by extending a few extra benefits that have almost no downside. There are others who for some reason enjoy upsetting and scaring away the very people you are supposed to be catering to. I can't understand the motivation for these people. It's like they want to have the games populated with rocks, and sharks.

It's easy to lose sight of the impact scaring away those customers has because there's still alot of chum in the water. There are still many many bad players coming and sitting and routinely playing poker. However, every time you scare off a bad player and they don't return, the pond shrinks by one. There is a finite number of fish in the sea. To add to that I don't see another poker boom coming in North America for a long time, so the number of 'new' players coming into the game isn't going to increase. Even if a person is driven away only 10% of the time, start multiplying that by the number of people who are acting this way (in this and other situations) and things are just going to get worse.

The game is getting harder and harder every year. Watch old episodes of 'Live at the Bike' from 2005, then watch the same games from 2007 and again from 2011-2012. It's evident in simply just watching the starting hands people play from then to now. Watch the frequency of C-betting, and other indicators that you can actually measure. This is partially because of people wanting to study the game and get better but it's also due to a decrease in the amount of 'gamblers' that are sitting down, dropping 2 buy-ins back and leaving and an increase in people pushing every edge to make an extra $1 or 2.

So to everyone who wants to continue making money from poker in this decade and the next etc. Think carefully about how you making bad players feel and start instead finding ways to invite them back to the game instead of running them off.

Good post, zunni!

Get away with... what? With betting light? With bluffing you? Force them to show enough times, and I promise you, they'll stop doing that to you.

This is where we differ. I do not expect the same courtesy from others, because I know that anger and frustration tend to happen when expectation and reality clash.

I expect those at the table to have no idea about etiquette or procedure or good starting hands or value betting or anything else. In fact, I seek out games where those at the table are less sophisticated than I am. It's what I hope to see.

I hold myself to a higher standard than I do my customers. They limp with A8o UTG, I don't. They berate others for crappy play, I don't. They stall at showdown.... I don't.

If you expect to get what you give, then you might be playing at the wrong tables.

I still fail to see how your stalling "you show first" tactics aren't what you describe here as something you don't like. When the other player stalls, he's being inconsiderate, but when you stall, it's for the good of the game? Is that what you're saying?

1. You paid for a chance to drag the pot. Drag it and move on. If you really called for information, you made a bad call.

2. If you think you need that information, you are not thinking about the game correctly. A player's range is far more important than their actual hand.

Why would you want to do that?

While im in favor of just flipping your cards over, people keep saying #2 and its a little silly. Yes of course that's true. But where do you think we get ideas of what someone's range is? From seeing hands.

I'm not expert, but for me, at least, I get a lot more information from other sources. Talking to the players between hands, for example. I can offer a light commentary on the player's hands with others, and I'll often get shown the cards, or at least told what they are. Players share their overall strategies and philosophies about position, the button, etc. They'll tell you what they think about others.

Most importantly: They'll tell you what they think about you.

Knowing what a player happens to have the one time we happen to get to showdown out of all the hands played at the table is one thing.

Saving the player from embarrassment and getting a direct line into the player's thought process about everything all the time? Quite another.

Most poker players are very self-centered, and have little interest on anything going on outside of their little bubble. Having to know exactly what this one player had on this one hand is part of that self-centered bubble.

At least, in my view. I'm just one person, and I'm not very good at poker, so take it for however much you feel it's worth.

Honest players are easier to play against.
I make more money value betting than bluff catching.

I have taken to making the mini-speech "okay, I guess I'll pay you off" when I make a marginal call-down. It's then very obvious (even more so when I say something like "I just gotta see your cards" as well) that I expect to be shown my opponent's hand. If I'm making a solid call, I'm still in the no-speech and-let's-race-to-show-first mode. My on-table persona is one of a friendly reg which benefits from being likable and someone (less savvy) folks aren't looking to go out of their way to bust. YMMV.

I agree with all that. As I've said I find myself exactly agreeing with your views on poker. Like I said I'm all about not making people show. For a whole lot of reasons. And I think you lose money by doing so by making the table worse and making people not like you (so they won't give you the information you mention).

But there is certainly informational value to seeing a hand as it is very useful in determing a range. I just think all the other factors I have mentioned in my 100 posts in this thread outweigh that value by a lot.

That might be true. But you would make even more money value betting AND bluff catching. Keep in mind they bluff you with an entirely different set of hands than they call value bets with.

The first sentence is true for a player that is good/better than you, but against typical 1/2 or 2/5 fish that are god awful and bluffing I would much rather play against an aggressive opponent than a lose one.

First of all, bear in mind you see far more hands when other people showdown, so long as you are part of the 1 percent of players who carefully watch hands after folding. Are you in that 1 percent?

Second, you get a ton of information from betting patterns and physical tells.

Third, one hand can be totally misleading. 2 plus 2 is filled with tales of players showing one bluff and getting calls all night.

Fourth, most of the time they have what you think they have anyway.

okay two points here.
one is that it isnt all about getting info by making him show his two cards although you do get info from it. it is also about you showing eight other people your hand those times you need not.

second point it is almost always better not to have players taking shots at pots bluffing you. unless they are doing it way too frequently.

For the sake of argument, let's just say that you're in seat 3, and another player who everyone is getting into hands with, is in seat 8.

Let's also say that we're in Vegas, you've never seen this guy before, and you don't really know what kind of player he is.

How do you expect to have a conversation with him between hands? What if he's got headphones on and won't talk with anyone around him?

Now, imagine this guy is running over the table. He's very aggressive, raising and re-raising, betting big, and taking down pots left and right, without having to show.

By some fortune, you happen to get into a big hand with him. He has just shoved on the river, and you're holding the nuts. You call. He doesn't flip up his hand immediately. Instead he waits to see what you've got.

Don't you want to see the kinds of cards this guy has been playing all this time?

If I have the nuts, I'm not slowrolling, regardless of other considerations.

Whatever he has this hand is no indication of what he had before or what he'll have again. I'm interested in when he bets. Position. Board texture. History of the hand. The contents of one hand is no kind of information at all, because it doesn't really tell me anything.

(Edit: So we've accepted that we're playing "you show first" games and are now looking for times it's okay? I'm not saying there's never ever any reason to wait ever in the history of time or space.... I just think it's not nearly as helpful as most people think, and that in many cases it has the long-term opposite desired effect.)

I really wouldn't call this "slowrolling". To me, waiting to see his hand wouldn't be that at all. Just waiting my turn to show.

The contents of one hand WILL show you something. Did he raise with rags? Did you just catch him bluffing? Holding the 2nd nuts? You will have another piece to add to the puzzle, along with all the other stuff you're looking for, like position and history. The contents of just one hand will help you start to put together an overall picture of this player.

I guess we'll have to agree to disagree.

Well you have a problem then. The very definition of a slowroll is slowly showing the nuts.

Seriously, you are going to sit there with a Royal Flush and make your poor opponent turn his hand over first just because you called his all-in? That is an extremely douchebag move imo.

Absolutely correct in both parts (slowrolling, and total inappropriateness).

Meh. I don't feel like going back and forth about this because its not particularly important. You seem to be saying "but there are other ways to get information." Yes, that is correct. But regardless of how many other sources of the same (or at least similar) information, this information has some value. It is just diminihsed to the point of not being worth giving up the value you get by keeping the game fun, etc. that you lose with showdown wars.

I would really love to have information as to what % of the people saying "make him show" play or played extensively online and what % of the people saying "just show" primarily play live.

I would guess that it would be fairly illuminating.