Swimming in the Fishpond

            Call me, call me. Call me call me anytime.     Blondie

  I was playing in an online Sitngo game last night (yet another in a long line of losses) when I came up against a 'superdonkey'. This guy - let's call him MrX - was calling anything with absolute rubbish. The first time I was in a pot with him I hit top pair on the flop. I bet 3/4 of the pot and he called. On the turn I bet 3/4 of the pot and he called. On the river I got worried that he was slow-playing a monster hand so I checked. To my surprise he also checked and revealed nothing more than a busted inside straight draw.
   Another player - let's call him MrY - wasn't so lucky. He kept going up against MrX with big hands and getting beaten by absolute rags, usually on the river. When his AA was beaten by some rubbish like Q3, he went ballistic. He started abusing MrY and calling him all sorts of names, most of them unprintable. In the end he went all-in with a marginal hand against his nemesis and was eliminated. Not long afterwards I was knocked out (no, not by MrX) and went to a new game. MrY was in this game too and he was still going on about the 'donkeyfish' on the other table.
   This sort of thing happens all the time in low stakes games. I've been going over my game notes recently, and here are some of the comments about particular hands:
       *? How do you call a 4x raise with K7 offsuit?    [then a few lines down...]
       *? How do you call a 3x raise with K7 o?
       * All-in with top pair and beaten by fish with J7 - two pair. This player  previously went all-in with J5 against KK and won!
       * Getting short-stacked. Raise x2 with A8. Called. Flop A J 6.... all-in. Beaten by J6! How do you play against that bullshit?
      * All-in, short-stacked with AT. Called by K3. I get trip Aces, they get flush.
   This sort of thing used to really burn me up, just like it did MrY, although I don't get abusive towards other players.  The thing is, if you're going to swim with the fishes in low level games, you have to learn to cope with donkey plays. It comes with the territory. Getting mad is going to affect your game and lead to bad decisions.
   The point is that MrX was making bad decisions but getting lucky. But luck is only ever going to take you so far. Eventually, those bad plays will result in bad losses. On the other hand, if you keep making correct decisions, you will be rewarded, in the long run. The problem is, if you are sitting at a table full of MrX's cousins, it can get very frustrating. If you're playing against the dumb-luck tag-team it can be hard to keep your cool. But if you keep plugging away at it, the results will come.
   For example, I know that if I have an open-ended straight draw, the odds of hitting that straight with two cards to come are about 3-1 against. I also know that the odds with one card to come are around 5-1 against. So if someone bets big or if the pot is small, then I don't have the odds and I don't call. No matter how many times you see someone call those big bets and then hit their straight on the river, you know the odds were against them and they just got lucky. If a lot of players are making foolish calls then some of them are bound to get lucky.
   There's no point in going on tilt because someone calls your big bets and then draws out on you on the river. For every time that happens, there are multiple times that the calling player loses a lot of chips. It's just that we tend to remember those bad beats and forget about all the other times we had a nice collect. By the same principal, the fish who is always chasing that inside straight will always remember the one time they hit their straight on the river, and not the five times they missed it.
    So my advise to MrY is to cultivate a Buddha-like calm. When you get beaten by the ragking, refrain from making comments about has mother or using words that get turned into a string of **** by the software. Just type in "nice hand". The sarcasm will go right over MrX's head.
   My advise to MrX is very simple. Call me. Please.