If your opponent makes bad assumptions or bad decisions, your decisions won’t be rewarded properly, and it can take you a very long time indeed to figure out from first principles that that is happening. If you are playing with a player who thinks that “all reds” is a strong hand, it can take you many, many hands to figure out that they’re overestimating their hands instead of just getting anomalously lucky with their hidden cards while everyone else folds!
(Is someone who knows more about poker than I do going to tell me that this specific example is wrong-ish? We’ll find out!)
I’ll take the bait since this is one of the cool meta aspects of poker!
There’s a saying in online poker: “move up to where they respect your raises”—it’s poking fun at the notion that it’s possible to play well without modelling your opponents. The idea is that it’s not valid to conclude that if you lose to a poor player, that you weren’t “rewarded properly”—it is in fact your fault for lacking the situational awareness to adjust your strategy.
For a good player sitting with a person who thinks ‘all reds’ is a good hand, it’ll be obvious before you ever see their cards.
Anyway your point is right about the difficulty of learning ‘organically’ where you only play bad players. A common failure mode in online poker involved players getting stuck at local maximums strategically—they’d adopt an autopilot-style strategy that did very well at lower limits surrounded by ‘all reds’ types, but get owned when they moved up to higher stakes and failed to adjust.
For a good player sitting with a person who thinks ‘all reds’ is a good hand, it’ll be obvious before you ever see their cards.
I basically agree that it will be obvious to you (a reasonable poker player) or even to me (an interested and over-theorized amateur), but as I said in a cousin comment, what actually matters is whether it’ll be obvious to the student making the mistake, which is a taller order.
I think that “all reds” is overstated as literally written (I mean, you’ll eventually go to showdown and have it explained to you), but I mean it to gesture at a broader point, and because the scene in Eleven is too good not to quote.
I’ll take the bait since this is one of the cool meta aspects of poker!
There’s a saying in online poker: “move up to where they respect your raises”—it’s poking fun at the notion that it’s possible to play well without modelling your opponents. The idea is that it’s not valid to conclude that if you lose to a poor player, that you weren’t “rewarded properly”—it is in fact your fault for lacking the situational awareness to adjust your strategy.
For a good player sitting with a person who thinks ‘all reds’ is a good hand, it’ll be obvious before you ever see their cards.
Anyway your point is right about the difficulty of learning ‘organically’ where you only play bad players. A common failure mode in online poker involved players getting stuck at local maximums strategically—they’d adopt an autopilot-style strategy that did very well at lower limits surrounded by ‘all reds’ types, but get owned when they moved up to higher stakes and failed to adjust.
I basically agree that it will be obvious to you (a reasonable poker player) or even to me (an interested and over-theorized amateur), but as I said in a cousin comment, what actually matters is whether it’ll be obvious to the student making the mistake, which is a taller order.
I think that “all reds” is overstated as literally written (I mean, you’ll eventually go to showdown and have it explained to you), but I mean it to gesture at a broader point, and because the scene in Eleven is too good not to quote.