[KingOtter]

[ QUOTE ]
There's something in psychology called the "availability heuristic." What it means is that people tend to over-estimate the occurance of memorable events while downplaying the occurance of routine, non-memorable events.

[/ QUOTE ]

Oh, I'm familiar with that affect. It's the main cause of comments like 'Party is rigged', etc. I know that the brain likes to play tricks on you, and I do take steps to try to counteract them before I rush to generalizations. I'm a pretty critical-thinking kind of guy.

I haven't gone back to prove myself with numbers, but I know that it doesn't happen just once or twice a night (and not always to me, I see others trapped by it, too). I always comment those players, but it always seems to be someone new doing it, although I have caught one guy with a previous note. It happened to me on two separate tables at the exact same time last night. Yeah, I know, that argues for your phenomena, since that makes it all the more memorable.

The style of play seems to be that they don't like to open-raise it, or 3-bet hands like AA, KK, AK, sometimes QQ.
They will raise it out of the blinds if they have enough limpers, or out of late position.

I've seen it frequent enough that I think there is a book or web-site somewhere advising it... or maybe they just watch TV poker too much.

[ QUOTE ]
I think you pick this up uncontested far, far more often than you run into a trickily played overpair, a slowplayed straight, or a misplayed top pair. It's just that you remember the later cases and forget about the former.

Seriously, you can make a good case for betting this turn with literally any two cards. I've seen that advice show up in multiple books (I'm thinking Yao and Freeny, but there may have been others as well. Harmon's chapter in SS2 is another possibility, but I would need to review that one). If it would be reasonable to bet this turn WITH NOTHING AT ALL, then it has to be right to bet the turn with a legitimate hand that figures to be good at the moment.

[/ QUOTE ]

Well, at least I wasn't completely out in left field, except pre-flop, perhaps... [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

KO