From The Felt: They might not be very good at poker.

Monday, March 9, 2009 - John Greene

You’re in a tournament where the blinds have hit 750/1500. You’re trucking right along, playing the game as best you can and suddenly you catch this guy catching a lucky draw after betting heavily. The next time, they play heavily on a pair when there’s a straight flush resting on the table staring at everyone. After that, they win a small amount from pocket rockets when the board has number salad and one low-endface card. What’s going on?

They just might not be very good at poker.

I know, it seems amazing that someone who’s not very good at poker can get as far as those sorts of blinds but I’ve seen it happen more than once and worse than that, I’ve seen seasoned players who have no small amount of talent fall to the idiot savants who practice the zen art of sucking. There’s a couple of reasons why, but the main one has to do with their tells. Every hand they’ve held is important to them and you get more and more tells so there’s a confirmation bias occurring when they do actually end up getting gutpunched on AA or KK.

It’s usually because they’re new to the game and it can be difficult to suss out if this is an act (I’ve seen less aggressive/stupid behavior at the table) or someone is being genuine in their inability to go in for the kill, but my general advice is to play a little more conservatively around these people instead of trying to guess when they’re actually bluffing. It’s better to let yourself get bluffed and lose blinds than be wrong and hand over too much of your stack. Let someone else fall on their sword in their efforts to take down the new guy.