Loosing is a part of poker

I really like Italian poker players because they are completely nuts!
Yesterday I was playing online poker in a 20NL Texas holdem cash game on a table with 5 other players. Directly to my right there was an Italian guy. This guy was a good example of a really bad player. No offense Italians, but this guy was a real lunatic. He was constantly chatting with himself in Italian and I couldn’t really understand what he was saying but it was clearly no discussion going on.

I don’t really care if people are chatting on the poker table. As long as I don’t let them provoke me I feel that it can be used to my advantage. A classic online tell is when a guy suddenly stops chatting. Then you know for sure that he has got a big hand!

When you play against really crazy players like this Italian guy you have to give up bluffing, it’s simply impossible. I knew this and instead of bluffing I started to call him down and value bet lighter. It worked out fine and I started to build quite a big stack. Even more important; the crazy Italian guy had a lucky streak and was also sitting behind a big chunk of chips.

After an hour I finally got the type of hand I was waiting for – pocket aces!
I bet out $0.70 from cut off and all the other players folded except for the Italian, who called. The flop was 3s 8h Jc and the Italian guy bet out $0.80, almost half the pot. At this point I felt sure I had the best hand. Even though the Italian was crazy I thought that the chance of him donk-betting (bet first out) with a set or two pair was very small. I also knew that the Italian guy would call a reraise with pretty much any pair or draw. This was a mandatory reraise for me and the Italian guy instantly called for 2 more dollars.

On the turn the pot was $5.30 and the card was another 3. The Italian guy bet out half the pot once more. I saw the 3 as a good card because I was now ahead of any other two pair hands. I reraised once again, now to a total of $7 and the Italian guy called super quickly!

In my opinion a quick call like that is often a sign of weakness. A player with a marginal hand will often call quickly to get respect by showing that he doesn’t intend to give up his hand. The pot was now $19.30 and I felt pretty sure that I was up against a hand like KJ.

The river brought a 6 of hearts and the board now looked like this: 3s 8h Jc 3c 6h. The Italian guy bet only $2 into the 19 dollar-pot and Istarted to think of how much to raise. Surely the Italian could have me beat but most of the time I will loose a lot of value by just calling this bet.

I raised to a total of 12 dollars and the Italian guy called immediately. The Italian showed his Q3 off suite and wrote “ahahaha, I take it home to Rome” in the chat box. I wanted to puke all over myself, but this wasn’t the first time something like this happened to me so I just sighed heavily and continued playing poker.

When you play against maniacs like this you have to be able to take bad beats. In the long run they will give you their money but once in a while they will get lucky. These players rarely realize or care about how bad they are playing. They easily forget their losses but remember every time they had a lucky run. This sort of behavior recreates their bad habits and without them even knowing it makes them into big losers in the long run. This is exactly the type of players I love to be up against because they will do all the work building the pots for me.

In this particular case the Italian guy even played his hand badly when he hit trips. He should have realized that I had a hand like aces or kings and bet more on every street or move all in on the river instead of just calling my raise. Now I was left with a little bit more than a third of my stack, but I could have lost it all.

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