Another dynamic that I’ve noticed is that multiple fish love to swarm a tight “good” player who plays sound poker. They can to some extent effectively gang up on you. Add even one more solid player to the mix, and they tend to get more careful.
For instance, the other night I was playing a 6max tourney with two tables, but there were only 7 players early on (more joined later). I got stuck playing three- or four-handed with a suite of players who I know are terrible... Loose, passive, sticky fish.
That might sound great; and eventually it did work out for me.
But for about an hour I had to endure a ton of variance (until tables filled up and play became more conventional). With the three sticky fish, I was getting every single one of my preflop raises called by 2 or 3 players, with ranges I could not really read because they included such a giant percentage of the deck.
They were sticky post flop as well,.
Again, sounds great. Just wait to make a decent hand and get paid, right? Well, sure.
But I find when you go to flops multiway against multiple loose stations with wide ranges, you have to have a pretty strong stomach for variance. One fish, great... Three fish, not so much.
If I have AsKs and the flop comes KdTs9d, I am well ahead a lot of the time. But there is also a very real chance that even when I bet big on the flop, every villain with a 9, T, J, Q, K is calling, not to mention some underpairs and all the flush draws, including really weak ones like 6d3d. There are a lot fewer clean outs to come than if I was heads up against a thinking opponent. Multiway against sticky fish, there is just a lot more chance of someone making that gutshot straight, flush, two pair or trips by the river.
So when the turn is a J, every Q in the deck beats me. And these guys can have every single Q including Q2 off. Or a Q comes, and every J wins. Or an 8 comes, and now all Jacks, Queens and 7s go to the river.
They each are chasing with “only” 4 outs on the flop, plus some backdoors... But three villains have a combined 12+ outs on the flop among them against my TPTK, meaning I’m basically flipping if it gets to the river. They are not thinking about your cards, let alone your range, but just thinking “I COULD MAKE A STRAIGHT OR A FLUSH AND SHOW THIS SMART GUY WHO ’S BOSS!!!! CALL DOWN!!!!"
Never occurs to them that they could miss, or someone could make a bigger straight or flush or two pair. Some of them will also bet big with marginal made hands. So you get paid a lot. But you also get sucked out on a lot, too, so the swings are big.
This table was really exasperating for a while. I raise my button pre with AQo, I get called by all three villains, and the flop came Q22. One of them of course has a 2. I raise with AJs, flop is J33, one of them of course has a 3. The game isn’t rigged; I was just facing three opponents who collectively have massive board coverage.
I dealt with this by (a) rebuying twice, feeling reasonably sure that I could get into the money in this game; (b) continuing to stick to a strong starting range and knowing eventually these will hold up; (c) betting made hands aggressively, so that I could really get paid. And then rode that to chopping the 1st/2nd place money...