Bad agro and by the book players
It seems like the biggest whales at low stakes are not the loose passives.
You see these agro LAG maniac types who get away with some bluffs, but usually play to loose and spew.
Then you see players who look like pros, buyin for the max, raise a wide range and don't limp, etc. Then they will stack off 150xBB with TT on 954 or something and when it goes allin, they are usually against a higher pp or a set.
3 Replies
What's the question?
FWIW, my understanding of the term "whale" is that it just means a big fish, someone very loose and very passive, paying off big bets with garbage hands. A "maniac" by comparison is also very loose, but very aggressive, betting and raising with too wide a range.
I would speculate that there are more maniacs in the player pool than whales, because so many bad recs get it into their heads that they can compensate for a lack of skill with amped up aggression, leading to them playing too many big pots with too weak a range.
It's not that maniacs are the biggest whales, it's that as a group maniacs donate more than whales, simply because maniacs outnumber the whales by such a huge margin.
When I hear someone talk about how some "idiot" or "whale" called their huge bluff with 3rd pair, I often think the speaker is probably too aggro, bordering on maniacal, without realizing how trashy their table image is.
(Speaking from the perspective of a maniac in recovery.)
Most low-stakes players are losing. Even a very high number of high-stakes players are losing.
Who is losing more? Well if they all showed up to the game with the same amount of money in their pocket, the loose passive probably lasts longer. A more aggro style of play is going to lead to higher short-term variance and so is going to get felted more frequently. So if you are a good player, you can probably profit more from the maniac types if you can develop an effective counter strategy, because the maniacs are willing to put more into the pot. You'll still felt the loose passives, but it will take a lot longer winning 10-20bbs at a time.
I will say that it is much harder to identify the bad agros as "bad", as often good play can look really bad when you are only seeing the hole cards occasionally. Great play is very aggro and pushing the line frequently. So it isn't always obvious whether an aggro player is playing good or bad, and its often expensive to find out. If you were playing a GTO solver, your read would almost certainly be "maniac" because GTO solvers make plays that look absolutely nuts and have much higher levels of aggression in a lot of spots that humans won't find. So I think its tough to identify if a maniac is profitable or not and whether their lines have a logic or is just button smashing until you have played them for a long time.
On the other hand, it is really easy to identify a loose passive as loose passive, and loose passive is never a good play. It is much easier to exploit a loose passive than a maniac, and your mistakes will be less costly because the pots are smaller. Someday, the maniac might learn and become a good player. The loose passive might mature into an OMC and roughly break even when people inexplicably pay off AA too frequently.
If you were playing a GTO solver, your read would almost certainly be "maniac" because GTO solvers make plays that look absolutely nuts and have much higher levels of aggression in a lot of spots that humans won't find.
People say this because they see the ranges a solver will raise in a certain spot on the turn/river seeing a slightly filled box that they'd never bluff but ignoring all of the previous heavily filled boxes saying fold that they also mostly ignored.
So, yeh, the solver shoves N% of the time when you never would, but the solver only makes it to that spot with that hand M% of the time that you do. The more I look at solved data the more I think M heavily out weighs N and that most low stakes players would have a read that a solver was a nit/OMC.
For a personal/real example (and I realize this is going to sound bragging, but eh) I've played roughly 115 hours this year so far, and can think of roughly 2-5 instances where the entire table gasped when I showed my hand in a "wtf did I just see" kind of way ... but the main read people seem to have on me is that it's easy to play against me because I fold a lot, don't bluff and always have high cards.
FWIW those gasps are at best 50% when V folded and I showed for some reason, so I should maybe bluff less ... but then I don't often show bluffs.
