As an average bigger limit player sitting down at a low limit Hold’em table, most of the players with the exception of you are mostly passive and semi loose, meaning they don’t like raising and love to be able to call a single bet. When you are not a loose passive player yourself, or you never learned how to adjust to passive loose games, they can cause more than a little frustration. You want to be aggressive because it works for you in your ‘normal’ game. You want to punish the other players for playing cards that should have been thrown away, because that is what you read, or were taught.
You bet and raise, and lose more chips. Getting frustrated, you crank up your aggression. After all, stepping down to this level of poor play, winning should be easy. You know you can make your losses back with a few pots in your normal game…or can you? Now you will need to win to make up for your losses at this small game, and you have to win more to show a profit in your regular game. If the cards are not there in your regular game, your session is not going to be a happy one.
When playing low limit Hold’em at a loose passive table, I prefer to think of myself as the IRS at the table using the Laffer Curve (which I just learned of). I tax the players at a rate I think they will pay to have a nice passive game. I defend them from invaders by raising, and otherwise cutting off the action of newly seated aggressive ‘bigger’ players. Usually those quick stop players leave in frustration to their bigger game, and my little kingdom belongs to me once again.
Of course passive players pay a tax to me for this service. Taxes are paid in the form of pots I win. I pay for their defense at the table in bets I may lose to a more aggressive player who just sat down. In some cases a bond of sorts is formed between the other players and myself. Of course more aggressive players will never understand how or why this works. In the animal kingdom there are many examples of mutually beneficial parasitic relationships. A savvy good player at a low limit table can become accepted as a beneficial parasite if they are wise, think about everyones game at the table, and the reason the game is there to start with.
This bonding happens by myself taking on a strong aggressive player in the defense of the passive players, sort of like a watch dog. The passive players are happy because they can continue to play almost every hand as before and they are not part of being mean to the newly seated aggressive player. Individually, they do not feel they are paying too high of a price having me sit at the table with them. I win an infrequent hand now and then, rarely raise, and seem to make some ‘lucky’ big hands, just like them.
It is like schooling fish in the ocean. No single predator fish eats the whole school of fish. They eat some of the fish, but never to the point of causing irreparable harm to the school of fish. The fish in the school know that some of them will not survive, and they accept it as their lot. The same concept happens on the African plains.
I can already hear non-thinking more aggressive players screaming that I am completely wrong! Those weak players need to be punished for playing the junk they do! When they get to the card room a few will find themselves sitting at a passive table, and they will set out to prove that they are right and I am wrong. Passive players are not stupid players.
They play that way for reasons other than to win money. If they feel they are being bullied, one of three things normally happen. They clam up, and the table becomes uber tight, they leave to find another table, go home, or turn into maniacs. Eventually they are replaced by other more aggressive players if they leave. Then the table then turns wild aggressive for a short period and then just as suddenly turns tight.
