[When2Holdem]

Picture this: You are sitting at a full ring game at your normal game at your normal limit. There is a player at your table who obviously doesn’t know what they are doing and continues to make bad play after bad play. Sometimes he sucks out but most of the time he donates to the pot. He is definitely a player I like to see at my table.

Then another player sits down, folds every hand 15 times and then finally raises a pot and plays a strong hand properly. That weak player at the table gambles with the new player, who will soon be our “offender”. Sure enough, the new player at the table who has only played one hand gets sucked out on and he starts to complain about what a weak play his opponent (the fish) made. The “fish” was probably proud of his play, probably proud of his win, and probably is not considering changing his style of play (good for us, right?) But when the new player at the table starts to go on about why the play was bad, the fish starts to tighten up to save future embarrassment and maybe even decides to read a few pages on the internet as to how to play “better” (bad for us, tight?) A few moments ago, he was thinking he was playing winning poker.

To not berate a bad play or player is fairly common advice. I have read it in numerous places, and I fully support the concept of encouraging a bad player to continue thinking that they are playing well. But the advice which I have read tends to suggest that as a good player, one should not berate weak players. I have seen nothing so far about how to deal with someone else at your table who is berating weak play. Unfortunately, it seems to me that this happens fairly regularily in online poker.

My question then, is how to educate the so-called offender of either a benefit or the many benefits of not committing this act of berating weak play and how to explain it in such a way that does neither compound the problem by confronting the issue of the play being weak nor does it instigate more steam into the already heated "offender".

I am very interested in any comments on this topic!
Thanks for reading.