As I said earlier, I'm not sure I have an opinion on Hero's action (who am I kidding). I do however, have a very strong opinion if I were in Villains shoes: I would have expected Hero to take every chip I had. I would have looked at the situation as my fault SOLELY. I would call myself dumb and would have a LOT of respect towards Hero for not treating me like a child. If he had soft played me, I would have felt like crap. That's just me as a Villain.
Maybe that different role point of view is helpful to you, Jim.
* Just to clarify: I'm not saying what you did was wrong, I'm just saying I would have felt like shit as a Villain, not worthy of the game I'm playing in. I would have much preferred Hero would have taken my stack.
This is usually my point of view. In general, I consider it contrary to the interests of the game to soft-play, and I mean any game, not just poker played for money. And, y'know, I also like to win.
I'll crush a grade-schooler's soul at Go Fish without a twinge of conscience. I play Words With Friends with my elderly aunt, and my W-L record is currently 466-126. I used to play hyper-LAG and destroy my own grandmother at NLHE when it was a viable strategy. If you beat me at a game, you legitimately beat me. This is my prevailing attitude in almost all cases.
Hell, I've specifically taken advantage of people not knowing the game in a mixed game too. I don't consider that out of bounds in itself.
It's just that the combination of factors here made me ease up. Specifically:
- Villain is a new player to the game, and I don't know him at all.
- The game is very young and may be tough to keep together, even without this kind of thing.
- I'd been getting hit with the deck all night and maximizing every win to the best of my ability.
- The game order was unintentionally set up in a way that's likely to cause confusion between the two Stud rounds.
- There's no cap on betting heads-up.
That last one is a pretty big deal. It's one thing to squeeze 10 big bets or so out of the guy by capping each round. It's a substantially bigger deal to raise back and forth repeatedly to take his entire stack of 40+ big bets.
It wasn't my intent to treat Villain like a child, and I really don't see it that way, but I understand what you mean. In the end, I still took 5 or 6 big bets out of him
after the point when I was certain of his error. The lesson was cheap but certainly not free. Taking a lot more than that would have felt abusive.