What is this person thinking?

[HOWMANY]

Middle stakes full ring live game. Person in question is by far the biggest donator in the game. He coldcalls a raise and at showdown villain has 4[img]/images/graemlins/club.gif[/img]2[img]/images/graemlins/diamond.gif[/img]. The next hand villain folds preflop.

What is the thought process behind playing 42o and then folding what is almost certainly a more powerful holding the next hand?

[ImsaKidd]

POT ODDS

[omaha]

If it was nl, with deep stacks, he could actually be correct, particularly if he is in the bb , and/or closes off the betting.

If its limit, or he only has a few blinds, his thought process should be ''im a complete moron"

[Mike]

They have money to waste and are out having fun?

[StevoC]

I remember playing a 5/5nl hand at FW with AK in BB. UTG raises to $40, I reraise to $120, he calls. Flop comes K46 rainbow. I check, he bets $50, I raise to $250, he calls. Turn comes 4. I check, he pushes all in for $400 more. I fold while saying nice hit. He shows 4,8o. We've all had hands like this at one time or another. If you want to know why people play this way, ask Hansen. Not my style, but sometimes it pays to be a moron. (not that Hansen is a moron, he's a great player, but has that really loose style)

I used to play with a kid who would often do unorthodox plays and it would constantly throw me off. Betting 5 times pot on the flop, how do you react to that with TPTK. You can't sit around folding til you hit a set, because when you finally make the move he won't bite. Fun times.

[Brad1970]

I ask myself this same question evey time I play. But you have to give action to get action. As I have learned, there are alot of players that WILL NOT fold for any amount of money if they get any piece of the flop. A piece is defined in my eyes as any pair, OESD, flush draw, gut shot draw, hell, any 2 cards of the same color will do!!!! That, ultimately, is where the money is but the variance with these type players can be a b*tch.

[SplawnDarts]

[ QUOTE ]
Middle stakes full ring live game. Person in question is by far the biggest donator in the game. He coldcalls a raise and at showdown villain has 4[img]/images/graemlins/club.gif[/img]2[img]/images/graemlins/diamond.gif[/img]. The next hand villain folds preflop.

What is the thought process behind playing 42o and then folding what is almost certainly a more powerful holding the next hand?

[/ QUOTE ]

In deepstack NL, mixing in a few complete crap hands and making sure you show them might be a winning play against math-minded opposition. When they simply can't discount any of the possible two pairs, it throws a complete wrench in their hand range math, and deprives them of their biggest weapon.

Of course, if it was limit or shallow NL, the guy's a moron. And even if it was deep NL, it's still pretty likely the situation wasn't right for mixing in any 2, and the guy's still a moron.

[HOWMANY]

It's limit holdem. There is no doubt that the player in question is a truly horrible poker player, I just don't understand what they are thinking when they play with one of the worst hands possible, yet fold about 20% of their hands.

Folding their unlucky hands? They're "running bad"? Played too many hands in a row?

[SplawnDarts]

[ QUOTE ]
It's limit holdem. There is no doubt that the player in question is a truly horrible poker player, I just don't understand what they are thinking when they play with one of the worst hands possible, yet fold about 20% of their hands.

Folding their unlucky hands? They're "running bad"? Played too many hands in a row?

[/ QUOTE ]

Ok, I understand the question now. The answer is that he ISN'T thinking, in the classical sense.

This is a classic example of Caro's law of lose wiring: our donk has not established a relationship between what he does (which hands (and situations) he VP$IP) and his results (whether he makes money or not). You might think, given that lack of correlation in his mind, that he would adopt a strategy at one end of the spectrum or the other ie. either play every hand or none at all. But Caro's law tells us that he will instead act randomly.

This is complete speculation, but I suspect that said loose wiring is actually a built in problem solving behavior that humans have. Perhaps the most fundamental one. When what you're doing isn't working (and regardless of the results of this hand, his overall results probably suck), try random [censored] until something does. Note that this may often be a good problem solving strategy when actions are closely correlated to results and the space of available actions is small. Hence why it's in everyone's toolbox. Poker just happens to be the type of problem where it fails, because especially in limit actions are NOT closely correlated to results most of the time.


If you think Caro's law is BS, and believe he was engaged in quasi-rational thought rather than subconscious randomization, then I have two alternate explanations:


1) Many people don't like to "push" their luck. Ie. they're OK with the idea of making knowingly -EV plays in isolation, but when they just got paid off on one, they don't want to make another. This is an extension of the "luck averages out" fallacy - they know the average result for their play has to be pretty bad, and they're up right now, so they intuitively think the next few trials are going to be super -EV to get them back to the bad average, and they want to skip out on that. Hence they don't play.

2) He was embarrassed to show the hand, and didn't want to be embarrassed again so he's going to wait for something a tad more respectable. Often times at low limits, folds are to avoid embarrassment rather than to preserve $. This little resolution of his may have only lasted one hand before the gamboool took over.


As is usually the case with psychology, If you give me a $ I can give you yet another contradictory but plausible explanation for the same thing.

[Lurker.]

his hand had showdown value...and he had pot odds though that was already stated.