Hey everyone - First time poster here. Please be gentle, I may not be using all the correct terminology that everyone is accustomed to, etc.
I have a very stressful situation and looking for advice on a long running home game that I manage. We play every month and have been going strong for about 7 years now. The home game is mainly just friends, usually between 6 - 10 people, tournament style with freezeout (no rebuys). The games last around 3.5 - 5 hours long.
For years, everyone has taken the game quite seriously, even though the actual stakes are low. As a bunch of middle aged men, it often feels like it's one of the few things we can still be competitive in, and we each take pride in our game and improving upon it as we can. Most of us are hyper competitive and results are tracked including several metrics you wouldn't expect such as endurance (how many hours and minutes prior to elimination, cumulative over the course of a year). We treat it like a league in many ways.
Here's the main issue. We have one player in our group who has started a somewhat new trend. They go all-in nearly every hand pre-flop, sometimes right from the very first hand of the tournament. There may be anywhere from 3 to 10 all-ins preflop from this player within the first hour of play, in certain cases back to back hands. As serious poker players, most of us simply fold to this play. The player in question has let us know on some nights that they are tired and it almost seems like they are looking for an excuse to leave early within the first 90 minutes. Remember there are no rebuys in this tournament so an elimination is permanent.
To be completely transparent, no one at our table can figure out why this player makes the effort to drive to the game and seemingly make it their life's mission to be out of the tournament in the first 90 minutes.
Some of the players have confided in me as the host that they are starting to find the games no longer enjoyable when this particular player is in attendance. The reasons are two-fold:
1) 90+% of the time, this player just donks their chips away to whoever has a hand strong enough to call their all-in, giving the other player an early unfair advantage. The rationale is that if a player is too tired to play, and just wants to give away their chips that early, why show up at all?
2) the other 10% of the time, when the player actually does make early double up knockouts and often with very questionable hands such as Q-6 offsuit, he just continues making the same all-in play. It's not poker, it's BINGO. We had always prided ourselves at having a thinking man's game. Sure, tournaments get rowdy in the mid to late game when blinds get higher and short stacks get desperate. That I understand but I can never understand an All-in preflop in the first hour of play even if you held pocket aces (or maybe especially if you held pocket aces).
I understand you can't tell a poker player how to play or how not to play. But is it ok to tell a poker player not to show up if they are too tired to potentially last the duration of the evening? It's a different situation, but I've heard before that if you were in an emergency situation and needed to leave a tournament, the ethical approach is to surrender your chips to the tournament director and not donk them off to another player (giving them an unfair advantage?).
We are now at a crucial point where certain people are no longer having fun at the games and hinting that they may no longer come to play if the core issue is not addressed. I've looked at some other threads that covered this problem but they mostly dealt with online play. I very much realize that in 2024 this is a part of online poker and it's something that must be adapted to in your own play. Is this rational applicable to our home game as well or are the complaints I'm getting justified?
Any constructive feedback or comments on how to deal with this is very much appreciated. I personally feel like I'm going to lose players no matter what route I take. What about moving from no-limit hold 'em to limit hold 'em? Any other solutions?
I have a very stressful situation and looking for advice on a long running home game that I manage. We play every month and have been going strong for about 7 years now. The home game is mainly just friends, usually between 6 - 10 people, tournament style with freezeout (no rebuys). The games last around 3.5 - 5 hours long.
For years, everyone has taken the game quite seriously, even though the actual stakes are low. As a bunch of middle aged men, it often feels like it's one of the few things we can still be competitive in, and we each take pride in our game and improving upon it as we can. Most of us are hyper competitive and results are tracked including several metrics you wouldn't expect such as endurance (how many hours and minutes prior to elimination, cumulative over the course of a year). We treat it like a league in many ways.
Here's the main issue. We have one player in our group who has started a somewhat new trend. They go all-in nearly every hand pre-flop, sometimes right from the very first hand of the tournament. There may be anywhere from 3 to 10 all-ins preflop from this player within the first hour of play, in certain cases back to back hands. As serious poker players, most of us simply fold to this play. The player in question has let us know on some nights that they are tired and it almost seems like they are looking for an excuse to leave early within the first 90 minutes. Remember there are no rebuys in this tournament so an elimination is permanent.
To be completely transparent, no one at our table can figure out why this player makes the effort to drive to the game and seemingly make it their life's mission to be out of the tournament in the first 90 minutes.
Some of the players have confided in me as the host that they are starting to find the games no longer enjoyable when this particular player is in attendance. The reasons are two-fold:
1) 90+% of the time, this player just donks their chips away to whoever has a hand strong enough to call their all-in, giving the other player an early unfair advantage. The rationale is that if a player is too tired to play, and just wants to give away their chips that early, why show up at all?
2) the other 10% of the time, when the player actually does make early double up knockouts and often with very questionable hands such as Q-6 offsuit, he just continues making the same all-in play. It's not poker, it's BINGO. We had always prided ourselves at having a thinking man's game. Sure, tournaments get rowdy in the mid to late game when blinds get higher and short stacks get desperate. That I understand but I can never understand an All-in preflop in the first hour of play even if you held pocket aces (or maybe especially if you held pocket aces).
I understand you can't tell a poker player how to play or how not to play. But is it ok to tell a poker player not to show up if they are too tired to potentially last the duration of the evening? It's a different situation, but I've heard before that if you were in an emergency situation and needed to leave a tournament, the ethical approach is to surrender your chips to the tournament director and not donk them off to another player (giving them an unfair advantage?).
We are now at a crucial point where certain people are no longer having fun at the games and hinting that they may no longer come to play if the core issue is not addressed. I've looked at some other threads that covered this problem but they mostly dealt with online play. I very much realize that in 2024 this is a part of online poker and it's something that must be adapted to in your own play. Is this rational applicable to our home game as well or are the complaints I'm getting justified?
Any constructive feedback or comments on how to deal with this is very much appreciated. I personally feel like I'm going to lose players no matter what route I take. What about moving from no-limit hold 'em to limit hold 'em? Any other solutions?
