Talk about your roller coaster ride, this past weekend of poker has been one of the strangest I’ve played in a long time.

I don’t know if maybe there’s been a sudden influx of new fishy players that heard the news of James Gold winning $12 Million at the World Series of Poker or what, but something sure was different about these tables.

Between Friday night and Sunday night I played a little over 1000 hands of $0.50/$1.00 6-Max limit hold’em and managed to earn a nice little rate of 5.56 BB/100.

By itself this statistic is not really very interesting, 1000 hands is a small sample and I could just have easily made -5.56 BB/100 over this period. What makes it interesting is the type of players I was up against, I admit I always look for a loose/fishy kind of table, but these were ridiculous. I was repeatedly sitting down at tables where 3-4 players would cap the betting preflop with any imaginable cards, raising and re-raising when they were drawing dead and generally just playing crazy.

These types of players mean big money but also big variance, even with my high win rate for the weekend I was felted more times this than I have been my entire on-line poker career.

So how does one adjust to these kinds of players? Here’s my tips:

1. Pay attention, if you usually play at multiple tables think about dropping one or two to allow you to really concentrate on these players. I found by playing only one good table I was able to make some plays that I never would have had I been multi-tabling and not paying proper attention to the players.
2. Loosen the hands that you will call a raise with pre-flop, these players are raising with anything and everything better to try and outplay them after the flop.
3. Draw more, you’ll often have the implied odds you need to see another card.
4. In a similar vein, don’t be afraid to re-raise with your strong draws. In many cases this is correct limit hold’em play anyhow, against these players it’s even more correct as more often than not they’ll be paying you off big when you hit.
5. Don’t bluff. Ever*.
6. Don’t go too crazy, you still need to play premium hands. Don’t fall into the trap of becoming too loose or drawing to likely loosing hands.
7. Don’t tilt. You’re going to get bad beats at these tables, it comes with the territory.
8. Pick your players. You’re still going to get the odd Tight/Aggressive player joining you, just stay out of their way whenever you can.

* “Ever” might be a bit strong, bit bluffing is generally -EV at these tables. Make sure you have a really good reason when you do it.

Truthfully, most reasonably solid players should have no trouble beating the kinds of players I’m talking about in this post by just playing their natural game. Theoretically you can just sit back, fold, wait for good cards and get paid off but in my opinion there’s so much extra money to be made at these tables by getting a little creative and jumping in and playing. Sure it can be damn frustrating when you get drawn out on again and again and again but as long as you’re able to see past the bad beats you’ll be nicely rewarded.