I'm all confused all of a sudden

[Blarg]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Jeez this seems so foreign from the world of the 11's, where people will call with any face card, 98 suited, and the like.

[/ QUOTE ]

Not my experience. Is this because you tend to play at peak hours and I tend to play at non-peak hours, since I'm in Sweden?

I'd love to see figures on stuff like average VPIP/tourney level, buy-in level and hour of the day over a large sample of tourneys. Anyone has anything like that?

Does it differ as much as people often suggest here?

[/ QUOTE ]

I tend to play evening hours, till midnight or so, PST. I regularly see the calls I'm talking about. I was just pissing myself the other day at getting sucked out on and booted from the tourney 3 times out of 5 or 6 by guys calling with 75 offsuit (two in a row!) and 54 offsuit.

Seriously, these guys have "blinds disease." Kind of like beginning ring players, who feel that their blind is still "their money," and that once they've "invested" it by putting up that blind, they can't throw away their money by folding. They just don't know any better.

Which is great when you don't get sucked out on of course, because you make a lot of easy money. But, when it comes to stealing, it means you can expect to get an incredible percentage of calls on your pushes, and they will often be with astoundingly random hands. Which, though potentially profitable, changes your situation from "trying to steal the blinds" to "showing down the cards I'm trying to steal with very frequently so I have to win almost every push" and "showing down the cards I'm trying to steal with very frequently so people quickly notice if my cards are less than stellar, and then are even more encouraged to call almost every push."

I say this as someone who doesn't push like crazy, either, and am almost always playing people I've never played before, so they have no particular reason to be calling with garbage except for a love of their blind money or a desire to make sure nobody bullies them, or a simple misunderstanding that calling an all-in for your entire stack with 7-5 offsuit when your stack size doesn't force you to do it isn't really a good idea.

I think the times of day may very well matter a lot here. I notice the games get much looser when I play in the evenings. That's why I play those times, and why most people do.