Quote:
Originally Posted by AALegend
1) Does he initiate a good amount of these strategy discussions? If its mostly you, please stop starting them as much at the table, as you are tapping on the fish tank and the other reg is rightly getting annoyed at it.
2) If this player's 3-betting range is what it sounds to be, it is a very easy flat on the flop at this depth.
I completely understand why some people (especially nits) hate talking strategy at the table. Don't tap the glass.
However, you know who likes talking strategy at the table? The fish.
Poker should be a social game. People love discussing a hand after the fact. It is no different than people love discussing a big sporting event after the fact. It is a way of being social.
Furthermore, listening to people talk strategy is a great way to understand their thinking.
It should be noted that talking strategy with fish is an art. You have to adapt your talk to their level and the number one rule is to not make them feel bad about their choices. You should be there making sure they are having a good time.
I regularly play with this guy who is a mediocre player. He actually isn't that bad except one really huge leak in his game: he never met a flush draw he didn't like. I have seen him call multiple overbets with 6 high flush draws on the flop and turn. As a result, he is a huge loser in the game. He will play fine, but get stacked calling it off with a terrible draw.
He likes to talk strategy with anyone and everyone. It is a real challenge talking to him because he clearly gets some advanced concepts, but he just likes to chase flushes. I have seen him fold JJ preflop and defend the action intelligently. So when I talk to him we will talk about preflop ranges and such and it will be a great conversation (plus it is a great insight into his thinking). However he will also want to talk about a hand after he blasted his stack off by over paying with a crappy draw. The only intelligent thing to say there was that it was a bad play, yet I didn't want to do that.
One day I realized that I needed to look at it from his point of view. Why was he calling with a crappy draw? He was looking to win big if he hit. I needed to talk at that level.
So one night he overcalls with a bad draw, misses, and gets stacked. He wanted to discuss the hand with me afterwards. He starts telling me his thinking. My response was "Yeah, it sucks that you missed. Imagine if you hit though, that was a big pot. You would have a ton of money in front of you right now." It doesn't matter that there might have been another player in the hand that had a bigger flush draw. I discussed the hand with him in a way that made him feel good about losing.
I later refined it to be even more honest. I would say something like "Yeah, you weren't getting good odds there, but if you hit you might win a huge pot."
Fish like to socialize. Discussing hands with them in a way that feeds that without pissing them off is great. I even believe in educating the fish because I think it hurts the mediocre, ABC poker players more than it hurts me to have educated fish.
Back to you question though, it was him that started the conversation. We had played with each other a lot and had lots of strategy discussions. He started more than I have. I used to think of him as an ABC type player so I tended to find discussions with him to be predictable and boring. It was only after I realized that he wasn't that good of a player and often got the right answer for the wrong reasons that I wanted to understand his thinking more.
My current thinking is that he is a player who has played a long time and has lots of experience so he knows many of the corr6plays just from experience, but doesn't know why they are the correct plays so he invents some crazy theories.
He got irritated because I pushed back on his ideas more than I normally do. I don't know why I pushed back this time. I just did.
As for discussing strategy in front of other players, we were sitting right next to each other and talking softly (while having many other non-strategy discussions). Furthermore we were not talking about the play of other players. We were discussing his play.