They can be the most profitable fish on the table and they can also do the most damage to your stack.  In live play it is easy to identify them.  They are slurring their words, struggling to stay awake, walking past their chair after a bathroom break, or spinning so hard they have to study their cards with one eye closed.  Yes, I’ve seen it.

Spotting them in online play is a little harder.  For all you know they are simply maniacs.  Still a maniac is a maniac, drunk or not, you play them the same.

The chatbox and timing tells are about the only way you can suspect them to be a drunkard.  If they keep timing out or taking a long time for easy decisions they might be drunk.   If they can’t spell right or make syntax errors in the chat box feature they might be drunk.   The only problem is they could be tilting, or from a faraway place typing a second or third language.  Or the garbled letters could just be his pet ferret slinking across his wireless keyboard.

Until you know for sure play them like every maniac.  Tighten up your starting hands, look for a good opening, hit your big hands, let them spew off their chips and pray they don’t draw out.  Saw a similar question and some good advice about this in regards to online poker but I think there is more to it.

Here are a couple more tips to utilize when you suspect your online opponent is acting like he’s just returned from a weekend at the Pub.

1. Confirm your suspicions.  Keep it simple and just ask:  ”Who else has tied one on?” or “I’m on beer number 5, anybody ahead of me?”  You don’t want the question to indicate disappointment in his drinking.  Make it a positive question that encourages him to reveal he’s been sipping from Grandpa’s cough medicine.  

2. If your target says yes, say you are too.  Whether you are or you are not.  If you are, why are you playing?  If you are just easing the nerves so to speak fine, but don’t fight drunk with drunk.  Any bouncer will tell you, those fights are often a lot of broken hands and self-multilations.  

3. Make it happy hour on your virtual table.  Encourage everyone to engage in more drinking.  “Grab a pint everybody!”  Or you can make the drinking, the payment of a bet in a prop-game… “Two spades on a flop you drink two, I drink two if two hearts come.  Two face cards I drink, two nonfaces you drink.”

4a. After you got him imbibing some more feel free to jibber-jabber with the guy and get him angry a little bit. A drunk has trouble thinking straight an angry drunk even more so.   When you hit your hand, bet into your victim with impugnity.  Overbet every pot you have an edge in and he’ll call you down and call you down and call you down.

If you don’t like to be mean-spirited to win, that’s okay you can get his money with these tips too.

4b.  Make your decision as quick as possible.  Doesn’t matter where you are in the ring.  Keep the action going quickly.  Get him under the pressure of the clock as much as possible.  The reasons drunks can’t drive is they can’t react quickly.  They can’t react quickly because they can’t think quickly.  Their brain is pickled.  

5. Talk to the guy.  You don’t have to be a jerk to distract him or tilt him.  You can do it with praise as well.  Feed his ego, let him know.  Wait, until there are two people to act before him and shoot him a chat message.  Now, he’s got to thank you and play his hand and drink his beer.  Drunks don’t multi-task well. Now wait for him to make mistake after mistake.

6. Console him because you are the wolf in sheep’s clothing or the shark in a fish suit (does that make sense?  No, but you get the image). You want him to stick around and drop more cash.  Also, now that you are his buddy, and he’s drunk, more subject to emotional whims then a sober player he might even lay off you when he has the nuts, which is good for you too.

7.  Most importantly, don’t lose your cool when he makes a bad play against you and wins the hand.  You want him to make bad plays.

One of the benefits of playing poker online versus playing live is not having to deal with the idiots that populate your typical live table.  Sure, there is the chat box function but you can always ignore that, however it’s impossible to ignore the chatterbox at the end of the live table.

Different disagreeable people come in all flavors.  There are the guys that try to needle their opponents to cause tilt, there are the guys that can’t stop talking because the poker table represents their only social interaction of the week, and of course there’s that other group, there just being themselves… slow-rollers.

It’s hard to slow-roll when you play online poker.  The hands turn up one after another.  Sure, you could take forever to call an all-in when you have the nuts, and do a virtual slow-roll, but it’s not nearly as common as the drama queens, that tease their opponents by showing one card then the other.  They might act weak to bait the person who got called down to show their hand first, and then show the near nuts for a winner.

Then there is the subtle slow roll.  Recently, I played in a poker tournament and got a little short with the blinds about to eat me up, I saw a suited ace.  I shoved.  I had a pretty good feeling my tournament was over when the tight player to my left shoved also.  Oddly, he had the same amount as me.

It folded around to the big blind, who paused and then forcefully said, “Call.”   I turned up my sure loser, the guy next to me shook his head and turned over a slightly bigger Ace-rag.  The big blind burdened himself with the count of how much we each had.  He saw our exposed hands and didn’t bother turning over his.

After a moment, and some prodding from the table, he turned over the other two aces.  Clearly, he had us both dominated, and upon seeing the other two aces out there he should have probably shown us immediately how thin we were drawing.   He didn’t give a speech, or draw out the turning over his hand with some theatre but he was still slow.

Fortunately, when I logged on to bwin to play some poker I didn’t have to deal with slow-rolling donkeys like him.

What’s the difference? You can’t help but hit a flop when you are running good. Even if you make a bad decision you are rewarded for it. When you are running bad you can’t win for losing. You make every correct decision and still give away your chips.

One is top of the world the other is a nightmare you can’t wake up from. Unfortunately, for poker players the yin to the yang is always a card turn away. The rushes never last long enough and the losing streaks are always too long.

However, both trends, both extremes in luck can be harmful. One breeds overconfidence and sloppiness, the other initiates results-oriented thinking and the tweaking of things that don’t need to be adjusted. The hardest element of poker is trying to reconcile and evaluate your performance when luck, usually a short-term swing, can be the most influential determinant.

You can play terrible and win. You can play perfect poker and grind away your chip stack. As a player learning endurance in tough times, learning self-assurance and patience in the valleys of variance, and recognizing your own mistakes when everything turns out right are often missed in the moment of living through the swing.

How many times have you questioned yourself in a hand that turned out wrong when you did everything right. The result is terrible, a guy hits a one outer, and you are wondering if you could have lost less or gotten out of the trap easier. In the WSOP Main Event quad aces ran into a royal flush and you just know the guy with quad aces was questioning getting all his chips into the middle, maybe not openly, but in the back of the mind, a little niggling questioning of his decision was going on.

It’s luck… it’s out of your control, but what you have to work to control is things you can control. Even when running great, step back and admit where you got lucky, perhaps realize where you got outplayed and the deck was in your favor for once. Learn from your mistakes not from your results.

When playing bad, it’s little comfort or consolation but know that you could be playing well. Don’t make your downswing longer by changing the elements of your game you are doing right. And also, seek counsel from others to prod you in the right direction if indeed you are doing things wrong.

If we all ran good all the time, there’d be no money in poker.

One of my friends was discussing a hand of his and here is my reply.  His thoughts italicized.

“I look down at two black queens. I raise preflop to $15 and get min-raised to $30 by the SB (MIN RAISE IS A BAD PLAYER’S RED FLAG THAT HE HAS KINGS AND MORE LIKELY ACES PREFLOP, SOMETIMES IT’S SUITED AK, SOMETIMES IT’S QUEENS AND OCCASIONALLY JACKS–BUT THE LAST TWO USUALLY OVERBET INSTEAD OF MIN-RAISE, SO ALREADY I’M GIVING HIM ONE OF THREE HOLDINGS, YOU ARE CRUSHED BY TWO AND FLIPPING WITH THE OTHER–I START LOOKING AT HIS STACK TO SEE IF I HAVE VALUE TO SET MINE POCKET QUEENS, THEN I AM HOPING IF A QUEEN DOESN’T COME I SEE AN ACE OR KING SO I CAN PITCH.  IF HE’S A GOOD PLAYER (HIS POSTFLOP BET WOULD INDICATE NOT–SO I’M MAKING AN ASSUMPTION) YOU HAVE TO GIVE HIM A WIDER RANGE). I call. The flop comes down 10 high. Now the SB leads up $15? I never have any idea what the hell this means. If you’re ever in a game with me and want to make my head spin. Bet $10 into a $400 pot. Anyway, I decide to see where I’m at and raise to $50. Then he moves all-in for $75 more. Damn I hate the way this turned out. I called, praying he had jacks”

Let’s see $60 in the pot.  Guy bets $15.  He has $110 behind.  You raise to 50 ($35 more) to see where you are at.  That’s a dangerous bet in my mind.  Let’s just examine that on its own first.  Many holdings by bad players are going to ship it on you.  Calling only leaves him $75.  He shipped it on you… did you find out where you at?  No.  Best case he is bungling AK or JJ.  Far more likely you are done. 

I’ve done the same play in the moment, so don’t take this as being critical of you in that moment, but rather in retrospect as you said raising to $50 did nothing for you.  What are the other options?

Calling feels weaker but it’s a little bit of pot control.  Normally with an overpair and no bad feeling I raise thinking I’m ahead.  Sounds like his bet gave you a bad feeling—pair that with the minraise preflop and I’m in a situation where I want to put as little money in with my queens as possible.  Too valuable to let go but, akin to Jimmy Fricke’s column in cardplayer you are either way ahead or way behind.  Guy’s preflop minraise makes me think way behind more likely than way ahead.

So, calling to the river is what I do when I get the bad vibe from a guy. 

Now, you guys might get it all in, anyway–oh well.  Or he might just “value” bet his overpair and bet $15 on the brick turn and $30 on the brick river.   Instead of losing his stack you might be able to lose less than half of it.

If he did have jacks, so what you cost yourself $65.  If he has AK, he might check the turn and you reevaluate, same with the river.  He’s drawing to six cards for that holding so it’s worth the risk.  More likely he has KK or AA and you’ll save $60 with either. 

Or, he river ships it and you may call and lose just as much.

Another option:  You could have thrown a min-raise back on him, he ships it on you and you only lose $30 and make a crying fold.  Don’t know what I’d do if he made the funny min-raise again.   Making it $50 does nothing for you because of stack size.  If you think he’s got an overpair, and you have reason to, the guy is looking for any push back so he can get his chips in the middle.  If you opt to push back make it the minimum–you can find out where you at for cheaper, and be able to fold to such a bigger bet than for one that is slightly bigger than your reraise.

I’d rather call the $15, see the turn, and hope he only charges me another $15 to try and hit my set by the river.

Not being critical, just offering a different perspective for that hand.