A fish in poker is a weak or inexperienced player, usually a recreational one, who makes enough basic mistakes to become the softest target at the table. Finding the fish and playing as many pots against them as you can is one of the surest ways to lift your winrate, and it starts with knowing which tells to look for.
What Is a Fish in Poker?
A fish is a weak or inexperienced player, often a recreational player who sits down for entertainment and treats the buy-in as the price of an evening out. The errors they make are predictable, they make them often, and those errors are what everyone else at the table is competing for.
One warning before you go further. Although “fish” is one of the best-known pieces of poker lingo, plenty of players still hear it as an insult, so it belongs in conversations about the game and not at the table itself. There are two reasons for that.
- Calling someone a fish risks upsetting them. It’s poor etiquette at best, and it can push a player to leave the table early, which does your winrate no favours.
- If your read is correct, there’s nothing to gain by announcing it. A player who takes the comment to heart and goes looking for coaching becomes a much tougher opponent next time.
Strong players think of weaker opponents as customers, and treat them with the same courtesy they’d want themselves. The games only stay good while recreational players keep enjoying them, which is why respect for the fish sits near the top of most lists of pro poker tips.
How Do You Spot a Fish at the Table?
You can’t target a weak player until you’ve identified one. The tendencies below are the usual giveaways, and any single one on its own means little. Look for two or three showing up together over a handful of orbits.
- Frequent open-limping preflop instead of open-raising.
- Not rebuying to 100bb after losing chips, which is especially visible online.
- Unorthodox preflop hand selection, either far too loose or far too tight. (Nits are fish as well.)
- Unorthodox postflop lines: checking down strong made hands, calling far too wide, or bluffing aggressively with no equity.
- Unorthodox bet sizings, such as oversized or tiny 3bets preflop, or c-bets that bear no relation to the size of the pot.
- Heavy use of the chat box. Good players online rarely say much.
- Visible inexperience live: mishandling chips, losing track of the action, string-betting or acting out of turn.
Why You Should Play More Pots Against the Fish
Part of the meta-game for a winning player is to get involved in as many hands as possible against the weakest opponents, and as few as possible against the strongest. You don’t need to duck the good regulars entirely, but there’s no reward for opening up wide against them.
Against a fish, expand your preflop ranges significantly. There’s a limit to how far that goes, and speculative hands still need position and a sensible price. The principle holds all the same: hands that are marginal against a competent table become clear entries when the likely caller is the weakest player in the game.
What Is an Isolation Raise?
An isolation raise, or iso-raise, is a preflop raise made against an open-limper with the aim of playing the pot heads-up against them. It’s the most common technique for increasing your volume against fish, and the mechanics are simple. Your opponent limps in for one big blind, you raise to 4bb or more, and the players still to act fold.
Sizing follows the room. In environments where several players call anything, live games in particular, iso-raises of 7bb or larger are common. The point of the raise is to buy a heads-up pot against the weak player, so if your standard sizing keeps picking up two or three callers, it’s too small.
Other Ways to Isolate a Fish
Iso-raising takes most of the attention in discussions about playing against weak opponents, and it’s only one of the tools available. These four matter just as much.
Iso-3Betting
Not every recreational player open-limps. Some open-raise. You can still isolate the pot heads-up by making small 3bets, and doing it in position gives you the best of what follows on the flop.
Expanding Your Opens
When the action folds to you, open-raise wider if there are fish still to act behind you, especially when they’re sitting in the blinds. In extreme cases you might open any two cards from the button against two weak blinds. Early position opens can widen too, though far less, since several players still act after you and some of them will be competent.
Completing from the Small Blind
Two small blind spots reward a wider range. When the action folds to you and the big blind is a fish, you can play close to 100% of your starting hands, completing with the weaker holdings instead of raising them. When you’re in the small blind facing an open limp, complete with a wide range and expect to see a multi-way flop, since plenty of playable hands aren’t strong enough to iso-raise.
Expanding Cold-Calls
The open-raiser might be a solid regular while the fish are still to act behind you. In that spot you can cold-call wider than usual, anticipating overcalls from the weaker players and a bigger pot with the worst player in it.
Playing the Player
Identifying and targeting the weakest opponents is one of the biggest contributors to a strong winrate. Most of a winning player’s edge comes from opponents who are significantly worse than they are, and very little of it from the regulars sitting either side of them.
That’s why table selection tends to matter more than technical brilliance. You don’t have to be the best player in the room to hold a healthy winrate, as long as you play more pots against the fish and fewer against the competent regulars. This is the exploitative side of poker, and it sits alongside the balanced approach covered in our guide to GTO poker. Learn the theory, then deviate from it whenever a weak opponent gives you a reason to.
Key Takeaways
- A fish is a weak or inexperienced player, usually recreational, whose predictable mistakes make them the best opponent to have in the pot with you.
- Keep the word away from the table. It’s bad etiquette, and it can cost you the customer.
- Spot fish by their patterns: open-limping, unorthodox hand selection, strange bet sizings, short stacks left unrebought, and constant chat.
- Widen your preflop ranges when a fish is likely to be in the hand, and keep them tight against the strong regulars.
- Iso-raise limpers to 4bb or more, and size up to 7bb or beyond in loose live games where callers are plentiful.
- Isolation goes beyond the iso-raise: iso-3bet the fish who open, widen your opens and cold-calls when they’re behind you, and complete the small blind wide against a weak big blind.
- Opponent and table selection do more for your winrate than any single technical skill.
