How much do bad players lose?

[Gabe]

How much do bad players loose? I mean like say a player who is really pretty bad. He plays almost any suited cards. He often calls on the flop with only a runner-runner draw. He’s not too aggressive but will usually bet top pair. He’s in a typical game with maybe two or three players who win ½ to 1 BB/hr.

How much does a player, who is not quite as bad, lose?

What about if the game has two or three winning players and a couple of players as bad as he is?

Why don’t we ever discuss this?

Which is better?

80/160 with one bad player, one mediocre player, six good players,

40/80 with two bad players, two good players, four mediocre players,

30/60 with three bad players two good players and three mediocre players,

25/50 with two bad players, one good player and five mediocre players?

(I ran into Josh, Andy, and Coileen tonight so the last question is partially hypothetical, partially practical, and partially rhetorical.)

Just trying to start a discussion.

[Senor Choppy]

If you have Turbo Texas Holdem, you can get a pretty good idea running a few sims. It seems that having a terrible player in your game can make up for a lot of good to average players.

I was curious about this sort of thing last week and ran 1 million hands with 1 of the best profiles, 4 of the 2nd best (almost identical to the 1st), 4 ok profiles (same as the other 2 postflop but not as aggressive preflop, and 1 profile that played 72% preflop. The 5 good players all showed a solid profit, the 5 ok players showed a minor loss, and the terrible player lost big.

IMO, this lineup was much tougher than any I've run across, and yet was still profitable.

If I had a choice, I'd take a game with 1 terrible player over a game with 2 mediocre-bad players. Given the 4 options you listed, I'd guess that the 40-80 would be the most profitable.

[chief444]

15/30 is the highest limit I ever play and normally just 10/20 (and low limit online) so your idea of a mediocre player might be more of a good player from my perception. However I would rather play in a game with 6-7 good players and a couple of bad players than a game with a couple of good players and the rest all mediocre players. It seems to me that just 1-2 bad players can make for a nice profitable night for quite a few good players but a table full of mediocre players is tougher to pull money from. Mediocre players don't win much in the long run but don't lose that much either. One bad player can dump 20-30 BB's in a couple of hours (or win that much if he is just lucky).

So I guess to answer your question I would say that the relative number of good to mediocre players doesn't matter nearly as much as the number of truly bad players. I would go with the 30/60.

I will also add that it seems to me once you get beyond a few really bad players at the table more of them don't seem to make as much of a difference. The game turns into a bit of a crapshoot and although it is obviously a very good game 6 bad players at a table I don't think would be that much more profitable that 3 bad players...or at least not nearly twice as profitable.

[StableHand]

[ QUOTE ]
How much do bad players loose?

[/ QUOTE ]

Everything they have. And some.

It's not so much they're bad players, they're also masochists.

I know the topic is HE, but allthesame:
A while back I was in a regular home-game, 5-card PL stud with reduced deck, same 8 or 9 guys, 1 good, 1 terrible, the rest mediocre-to-bad. I considered myself the expert in this crew, although in reality I'm pretty much a novice. The terrible fella always lost it all, the others won some lost some. This one night the kid got lucky, everyone lost to him. The party ended after everyone cut their losses, but the dude hung around, and wanted to play more. I took his stack in 30 mins HU.

He could not go to sleep with money in his pocket. If I wouldn't have relieved him of his burden, he would probably have made a pyre before going to bed.

[elysium]

hi gabe
my experience is that bad players are wiped out within 5 or so hours usually for about 2 to 3 thousand. a bad player with a bankroll of 10 to twenty thousand will normally last about 2 or 3 days, losing more and more at a progressively accelerated pace. often, alcohol plays a major factor.

the answer to the question 'how much does the bad player lose?' can be sumed up in a single word; 'everything'. it does no good to warn them because my experience has been that they won't listen to your warnings and consider them insulting. they're going to lose gabe, and there is nothing that can be done about it. it's brutal. one thing though; after the loser has done battle with you, you can throw him into almost any low limit game and he will have an easy go of it. the good loosers take their beating and then find safe harbor in the 10-20. the bad loosers return to you time and time again never reevaluating, never learning. recently, a young ladie approached the table screaming something about her husband having lost a considerable sum of money sending 3 of us ducking a possible shoe or key wad. we still don't know which of us she was screaming at. she was looking at me, but the other two players who also had recently benefitted from frivolous activity at the table themselves thought that she was looking at them. we don't know who her husband was either. anyway, this couldn't have been her first time castigating an entire table. it takes years of experience to appear to be looking at everyone at once while castigating like that. even mona lisa couldn't do that.

they lose everything gabe; everything they bring to the table. trying to stop them from losing would be like trying to stop them from winning. no difference. they have a right to lose and a right to win. they are fully capable of lowering their risk by moving into a lower limit game against weaker opponents than they. if you are in a 20-40 game or better, your opponents all know what they're getting into. take em down gabe. they're fair game.

[snakehead]

bad players in the 40-80 to 80-160 range often lose over six figures per year. I don't know how much that is per hour, but most of them don't play a lot of hours.

in the examples you give, the 40-80 and 30-60 are comparable. probably not much difference in win rate between them. the 80-160 is almost not worth playing.

[Six_of_One]

My favorite sushi chef (Hana Haru in El Segundo -- good stuff) plays mostly 4-8, sometimes 6-12. He tells me he's lost $80,000 in the past 3 years. He only plays once or twice a week, so that's some serious losing.

[andyfox]

Years ago, I had a friend who played 15-30 draw with us. He played four days a week, maybe 5 hours a day. He was your prototypical bad player. He told me he lost $30,000 a year.

One of the props at Commerce, who is medicore, rather than real bad, and who plays mostly 30-60 and 40-80 hold 'em and stud, says he loses $50,000/year. I don't know if this includes his prop salary, and if this is for poker only, since I also have seen him playing in the Asian games section.

Of your game choices, I would take the 40-80 game. I find I can often do better against a mediocre player than a bad player, especially in a game with a lot of bad players (the fish sort of schooling together to make each bad call less bad, whereas the mediocres will give up to my aggression). Six players who play worse than I do shoiuld be very profitable indeed.

Nice chatting with you last night.

Andy

[Turning Stone Pro]

Several years ago, I played in a home game with a bunch of older guys.

A fellow in that game lost $300 twice a week for 15 years.

I can still hear him say, as he kept pumping in $20 bills, was "Boys, call all bets."

Good times, good times . . .

Joe

[Analyst]

"Everything" pretty much says it all, unless someone is still playing within their limits of affordability. It'd be nice if that condition applied to everyone, but even within over just a few months I can tell that a number of the weakest mid-limits players aren't there anymore. Maybe they're just tired of losing, but they may have fulfilled Elysium's forecast. /images/graemlins/frown.gif

[DiamondDave]

[ QUOTE ]
it takes years of experience to appear to be looking at everyone at once while castigating like that. even
mona lisa couldn't do that.

[/ QUOTE ]

elysium, if we ever meet in person the first few rounds of Aqua Velva are on me.

[Steve Giufre]

What makes you say the 80-160 game is not worth playing when it is your regular game? I've seen it both exremely tough but also pretty soft at times.

[34TheTruth34]

[ QUOTE ]
How much do bad players lose?

[/ QUOTE ]

I lost $206 the last time I played.

[tolbiny]

Seems like if you know the win rates of the winners it should be pretty easy to figure out the loss rates of the losers.
say 3 winning players on average of .75 BB an hour at the table. 1 break even player, one player who loses the equivilant of the rake, and 5 losers paying the rake and the top 3. (this is tougher than my typical game /images/graemlins/smile.gif
if the rake is .5BB, and there are 33 hands delt an hour that are raked. that is 16.5 BBs raked, and 2.25 won by the good players. 18.75- 1.5BBs by the player who would break even if not for the rake leaves (guessing he wins 3 pots an hour on average) leaves 17.25 Big bets an hour by 5 players, each one paying on average 3.45 BB per hour- or 34.50 an hour for the privilage of playing with me.
seems reasonable to me.... Actually it seems absurd to me, that must be why i decided to become a winning player...

Ohh, and thats not counting tips to the dealer wich bad players do more often and in higher amounts in my experience.

[andyfox]

I think he meant the exact 80-160 game that Gabe posited in his post.

[J_V]

[ QUOTE ]
the 80-160 is almost not worth playing.

[/ QUOTE ]

So you often find games much better than this? What about at higher limits?

I must have played in some of the worst 80 games ever.

I think the last one I played in had 5-6 players making over 100/hr online and 3 other B&M pro and one mediocre player.

[snakehead]

80 holdem games can be very tough. often, the 40-80 is more profitable. in gabe's example, you would have to compete with six good players to get the money from one bad and one mediocre player. I wouldn't bother with that game unless I had no other choices.

in the 100 stud game I played today, I was against four bad players, I mediocre player, and two good players. a much better line-up.

[snakehead]

in la, some of the losing players have so much money it isn't possible for them to lose everything. i know it isn't like that everywhere.

[Duke]

I constantly hear great things about that game.

~D

[Bob S.]

In the first week Potowatami's Poker room here in Milwaukee opened, everyone learned who the main fish was when one guy played the first 5 days at 8-12 hours a day and lost 11k in the 20/40 (he actually won one day). This guy is the biggest fish I've ever encountered and try to get into his game when he is there. I would say his loss rate is about 3bb/hr, maybe more.

Bob S.

[James282]

If he plays 10 hours a day his loss rate is closer to 6 BB/hr.
-James