The Tax Cheapo

Some poker online sites attract several hundred or thousands of new players daily. Whether it be for play money, some recreational low stakes fun, or for some high rolling gambling, the players that come in droves come in many different flavors. Among these players will be some total noobs.

And by noobs I really mean poker neophytes. These are the players who are just learning the rules and have no idea about what the term “making plays” even means. They are the players who are impossible to bluff because if they have a pair, then they think they have the winning hand. They’ll draw to the river despite the lack of pot odds. And they generally are just bad at poker online.

But here’s how we react. We call them donks. We call them fish and berate them. But what we’re really doing, only we don’t realize it, is we are projecting our own level of play on them when in reality they don’t know what we know.

We get in situations with these players who are still wet behind the ears and expect them to notice and give us credit for our check-raise bluff on the turn, when to them the term itself is a foreign language. What we’re doing is overplaying our cards. And it’s hard a lot of the time to not give people credit for knowing such elementary terms as pot odds and turn and river.

So when you get on a table with this player and you want to automatically label him as a super aggressive donk who plays on a whim. You’re probably partially right. The player is probably playing on a whim. But observe this player and see how he reacts when different moves your recognize are played on him and they don’t work the way they’re “supposed to.” If you notice a pattern, it may just be that you have a player who is very new to the game. So don’t degrade him for not recognizing your “brilliant” plays, instead, just let your cards talk when you’re in pots with him. Get in there where it’s almost impossible for you to get out drawn, or when you have a monster draw and he’s not betting enough to keep you off your draws. Sometimes you have to just stop overplaying the game, and let the chips fall where the cards tell them to.