Quote:
Originally Posted by theman200050
Do people think it would be healthy for 2 people in a relationship to consistently play cash games with each other? Not unless they were soft playing each other at near 100% frequency. Which is what we saw.
I just want to return to this for a second.
There are perfectly legitimate reasons to soft play someone.
1. Busting a weak player in a cash game too early might take money off the table later.
2. The other person is a known aggressor and you play soft to avoid revealing any information unnecessarily.
3. You are unsure of your own hand's standing and want to minimise potential risk.
4. You are in a tournament, in a hand against another large stack and want to avoid confrontational because there are several small stacks who need to double or bust.
Additionally, we don't even know that the play was soft. The only hand that gets brought up consistently is AA vs JJ.
Two further issues come up:
1. Neither hand is really a lock by the river.
2. One hand does not make collusion.
The issue then becomes this:
People clamoring for action want players to give up equity--either directly by not playing together, or indirectly by making decisions they feel obligated to despite being less profitable on the surface -- because a miniscule sliver of the population could maybe take the resulting optics negatively if they read into them enough.
This is absurd. It is this kind of no-fun overreaction that makes poker appear so silly at times. This could have been a cute story, and instead the shrieking masses have turned it into a witch hunt.
