Re: A meta-perspective
Very good post, Lee. Your post title is where our disagreement is. Your meta perspective is cooperative, altruistic and humanitarian, while my view is narrow, selfish, and uninterested.
You wrote: "I'm posting this mostly because Tommy, who should (and deep-down, does) know better, said 'I'm all for soft-playing.'"
Just to clarify, I was talking about the opponents doing the softplaying. Not me doing it.
I think we have two questions now.
1) Does softplaying by some opponents hurt the results of the non-softplayers? I would answer no, not necessarily, based on my case history alone:
Almost all of my table time is and has been in a home-court environment. When softplaying is going on, I know about it, and I think I know how to manipulate it to my advantage. In long years past, in well-organized home games, I've played in full games where it was me and maybe one or two other players who didn't work for or borrow from the house somehow. There was flagrant softplaying all over the place, and I'm not going to go into why, but I believe I had a bigger edge with the softplaying than if everyone had just played hard all the way. The information war was unlosable.
But that's not at all what you are talking about. On to question two:
2) Is softplaying "bad for poker" in the meta sense, and a deterrent to new players?
Since the recent surge in interest in poker, the games around here have not changed in number, duration, ease/difficulty, or frequency of new faces (which has always been very high). There I am being selfish again. Lee? Do I have to have an opinion on the "bad for poker" thing? On the topic of slowplaying or anything else? Am I allowed to not care about the big picture except for when my little picture gets smudged? Meanwhile, I won't softplay, and I'll help new players feel comfortable.
(Q: What do you call the recent swell of online players? A: White punks on hope.)
Tommy
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