Quote:
Originally Posted by Ship It Or Bust
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.
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.