Your Best Customers

So often I have heard players who get sucked out on in a big pot, complain about the calls opponents make that end up beating them. You've seen them before. Someone gets running straight or flush cards, or they catch a four outer on the river and the pile is being pushed to your opponent. What makes it more painful is that you got your opponent to get their chips in the pot with horrendous odds, yet they didn't seem to recognize that.

I have some great news for you. You have just found your niche customers and potential repeat business. In each one of the situations where you got your opponent to get their chips in the middle when they were behind and they weren't getting the right price to call, YOU WON! I know, that doesn't remove the sting of the fact that they probably walked out of the casino with what used to be your money, but keep your chin up. When players continually make bad decisions against you, you have know found great cash paying customers who are may be continually willing to buy what you are selling.

One of the things that you have to remember is that you have very few edges in poker (for more on that, read "The Poker Mindset" by Matthew HIlger). One of the ways that you make money is by your opponents making mistakes, which are few in nature. If you have a table full of players that aren't willing to gamble against you when they are chasing a weak draw without the correct pot odds to justify the call in the first place, seriously, how are you going to make any money?

I heard someone once tell me that he believed that he would have more success in a game against players who understood what they were doing. That's a statement some make out of frustration when they take a bad beat. I understand the premise of where the comment is being birthed from, but in the grand scheme of poker success, it a purely asinine statement. Think about it, do you really want people that you've had success against actually playing better poker?

Players that you know will overplay a big Ace preflop to the river, or play two pair like it's the nuts when a 3 card draw to a straight or flush is on the board, are the types of players that in the long run will help increase your bankroll and make you the winning player that you strive to be.