Different times of the week definitely seem to each have their own distinctive character. I thought at first it was just the occasional situation, but Monday madness has repeated itself too many times now.

Weekends and weekday evenings are fairly similar – the regs open raise 3-4xbb,  fish limp in, flops are cbetted and then folded by the hit & missers. The fish are exploitable, and will even throw in their stack with a weak hand. Weekends are better than weekdays imo.

Monday mornings however are nothing like that.

There’s plenty of fish who are playing 53/0, and so it seems it should be profitable. The problem is they’re calling stations with weird betting habits.

A typical hand goes like this (sorry, my HH’s are at home, so no ‘real’ examples’);

A fish limps in, you raise 4-5bb in late position, the limper calls. Flop comes and you’ve missed. Fish bets 1bb. You raise to 3/4 pot as a cbet, but the fish calls. Turn misses too, so you decide to give up and see how it goes. Fish bets 1bb again, so you call (what’s the point of folding, you have two overcards and it’s only 1bb). River misses, fish bets 3bb with a pot of 23bb. You have Q high. You’re not folding, so you call and the fish has A3o and takes the pot.

Over and over again – all cbets are just called. Every street is bet 1-3bb regardless of pot size. Hands go to showdown and all bluffs are called. Every river has a tiny $0.40 bet on a $3 pot that you can’t fold to.

What can you do? Hunker down and just wait for a decent hand. Of course even the good starting hands often miss the flop, and so ultimately you win nothing – the money on the table is shuffled round and round slowly being given away to rake. Even hitting the flop has it’s risks as the fish will still want to see every street, and suck-outs are fairly common.

Here’s a hand from memory that’s an extreme example as it shows that nothing will stop these guys;

I’m on the button with AKo. The MP is a decent player and opens for $0.40 (NL10 as usual). I 3bet him to $1.60. The blinds are both the type of fish I described above (boy, was I sitting in the wrong spot) – they *both* call! The MP calls too.

Flop comes 852 rainbow. Pot is $6.35. One of the fish bets $0.40, MP raises to $3. I’m probably ahead, but MPs betting into four of us, so probably has a pair of some kind, so I bow 0ut. Both fish call.

Turn is something else equally blank – a 7 maybe (can’t remember). Fish bets $0.40. MP shoves, and one fish folds the other calls. MP has 8x (can’t remember his other card) and so has a pair of 8′s – fish has A4o. Ace high! He did all that shit with just ace high.

I’ve been utterly unable to adapt to this, and I almost don’t want to. The only way I can see it being beatable is by playing very tight and very fast – no slowplaying. Hit top pair and get it in. The only problem is that opening 3bb and only hitting a few flops can get very expensive. There’s a constant drain on your cash, and if you can’t get the big hands to pay off it’s not going to work.

I’ve no idea why Monday mornings are like this. Geographic in some way I guess. Old 2p2′ers talk about the halcyon days when the forums were in their infancy and 99% of online players had no clue. I wonder if it was like this – people who just play hand after hand and want to see every street like it was slot machine?

Maybe I’ll just sleep on Monday mornings from now on…

Update: Here’s an interesting article that talks about calling stations. He talks about how you can get ‘schools of fish’ and it appears almost like collusion (which is incidentally how I found the article – it suddenly struck me that if half the table acted like these weird fish, then collectively they would profit, albeit by collusion).

He suggests betting harder against them. A brave move but I can see his point. I don’t know. Maybe I could try it at some point, but maybe for now I think I might prefer just avoiding the whole situation…