I had thought to just throw out the title of this post and let it ferment for a bit before going back to it. It does load a plethora of pictures in my head, some are best left alone, and others can be explored when I’m not sitting at the keyboard. Donkeyville floods the whole planet, in all walks of life, yet ‘donkey’ appears to be a term that flows easily through the poker world.

I’ve never been a big fan of dubbing players as ‘fish’ and I’m not a big fan of ‘donkey’ either. I prefer the term ‘live’. I listened to a person that considers themselves to be a pro, explain the super highly sophisticated play of another pro (after I dealt the hand and the pro went broke) to the rest of the table. It’s the same kind of play I witnessed in a $4-8H game. So instead of being a donkey, the pro was a real player because he made the same kind of play that a $4-8H player would make? Gee…I don’t think so.

A friend of mine plays $1-2 NLH and $2-5 NLH. He told me that he’d been ridiculed for not playing higher since he has a good sized bankroll. His reply is, “I don’t know what you’re playing, but I’m playing no limit.”

I like his answer. I don’t think the size of the stakes dictates the level of play in all cases. In most cases, the low limits are reserved for people that are learning the game and some that just can’t fade the bankroll requirements and skill/knowledge level it takes to play higher on a steady basis. And some people don’t play poker because they want to play higher, they just want to play poker and they don’t want to play it based on your requirements, they want to play it based on their requirements. So should they be called donkeys because they don’t fit into your road map that dictates where your play is going?

I used to believe that out of all of the people that I’d ever met at the green felt, as a player and a dealer, that possibly four – yes FOUR – percent of them could honestly say they made a living playing poker. That would mean over a long period of time, not just a year or two or a few big tournament wins. Now I honestly believe that about two percent possibly make their living playing poker. It’s just almost impossible to beat the game over an extendedperiod of time and be able to say that you paid all of your bills and led the good life because you played poker for a living.

I watch people play, go broke, borrow, go broke, pay back, go broke, work a job, go broke, move down in limits, go broke, play across town in a low limit game because they went broke and they don’t want anyone to know they’re broke, so they must all be D-O-N-K-E-Y-S.

Unfortunately, the donkeys don’t know who the real donkeys are. When I was a kid and another kid called you a name, you smartly replied, “It takes one to know one.” Welcome to the Planet of the Donkeys.