"nice hand, sir"

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“The object of poker is to make correct decisions” Mike Sexton

I’ve been unable to play much live poker lately, due to a freakish back injury where I am unable to walk long distances or even sit in a chair for more than a couple of hours. I cannot even get in my hours for the month for the freeroll they are offering over at The Venetian. To qualify you need to play either 50 hours/month (May-July) or 200 total over the three months. I guess I’ll have to shoot for the 200 total. I estimate the additional expectation this freeroll adds about $20/hour to my hurly expectation (with high variance), so I don’t want to miss out.

So with these back problems I’ve been relegated to playing more online poker than I would like. One thing I notice about online that is different is the way the bad players are often treated. Some players are unbelievably rude to them. Why? I don’t know, it doesn’t make sense. I guess they are using it as a way of getting their own frustrations out, but this is just another type of distraction that keeps us from consistently making the best decisions in a poker game.

Think about it. Bad players make mistakes in poker. It is because of these mistakes that the good players win. The beauty of poker is that when you make a bad mistake, sometimes you get lucky and win anyway, but over the long run repeated mistakes will always result in losing money. But the occasional wins keep the bad players coming back. If it were a game like tennis, the bad tennis player would never beat Andre Agassi and would quickly learn not to play him for money. But in poker, the bad player sometimes wins and his lack of skill becomes camouflaged by his occasional luck.

When a bad player wins online, there are players who will criticize and berate him and say rude things about his mother. I just don’t get the logic. You want him to continue playing and to make mistakes, don’t you? But yet these guys say things that either discourage the bad player from playing, or encourage him to get better.

When I started playing poker about 7 years ago, when a bad player won a hand we used to simply say “nice hand” or “nice hand, sir”. Somewhere along the line the meaning of the phrase was lost and today “nice hand” or “nh” is usually meant in more of a genuine nature by players who lose a pot to a better hand (I now use “well played” when I lose to a suckout). It used to be that after saying “nice hand” you’d look over to another winning player and he’d shoot you back a smile or a nod. It was accepted that you’d keep the bad players happy, being kind and courteous and engaging in conversation and making them feel at home. They’d eventually lose their money as an “entertainment expense” and we’d all go home happy; they were entertained and we were richer. Poker, by nature, is meant to be a social game, but online has changed that in many ways. It has become more about ego to many players.

Enjoy your day!