• Sympathy for the Donkey
• …Or Maybe the Problem is That I Think too Much
• Playing in Short-Handed No Limit Games

Sympathy for the Donkey

By Nick Laurrell

I love bad players. I love bad play. Nothing makes me happier than to see an ill-advised call turn into a nasty suckout.

Why? Because idiots with money are fertile poker soil.

We’ve all lost with dried up drunks (AA) but not all of us have gone down with rockets to 7-9 off-suit in a $200 buy-in tournament (and the guy had to call 18 more BBs with about 1.9 to 1 pot odds, mind you.) It was undoubtedly the most egregious suckout I had ever suffered and when the Jack hit the river giving the numbskull a straight, a few players at the table offered both their condolences to me and their derisions to the ill-gotten victor. They told me that I had played it perfectly, got all the money in as a better than 4 to 1 favorite and that this guy had no idea what he was doing. Taunts of donk, donkey, fish, idiot and **** peppered the chat box – all of which were pretty true.

And then someone said, “oh well, there’s nothing you can do.”

And that is where I disagree.

Immediately, I sent the guy (I’m not going to blast a hobbyist player who got lucky’s screen name on a blog) a private message, “Wow, big call. I got unlucky, obviously, but I see where you were coming from. I’m just glad I don’t have to face you again!” and immediately added him to my friend list.

Wouldn’t you know but the idiot won the tournament and added five figures to his bank roll – and while you could hear a collective groan from the others he must’ve sucked out on, I felt like it was December 24th. For the next 3 days, I searched for him and him alone on Party Poker until sure enough, there he was playing at a cash table with stakes way too high for him.

And I joined the table.

And he didn’t recognize me because he was an idiot and was never paying attention to who he was playing against in the first place.

And I made back plenty more than the $200 buy-in I had lost.

The moral of the story is twofold: 1, 99.9999% of people who make money playing poker make the brunt of it in cash games and 2, don’t attack bad players personally, attack them professionally. Add them to your friend list, hunt them down and prey upon them in cash games where one bad beat isn’t going to break you.