[toss1]

Just a guess, but it reminds me of a comment I heard a semi-pro poker player make about playing with amateurs (waaay casual amateurs, mostly playing to pass the time while traveling for sports competitions).

He said that he was commonly surprised when he'd make a move that would be immediately seen by his peers as aggressive, or strong, and cause them to back off or fold, while with us, it just went right over our heads and we'd miss it entirely...

Seems like lower-skilled players could simply not see some of the complexity that confounds a higher skill player, and an even higher skill player would handle. A sort of local minima anomaly for skill.

Or, maybe like tho old saying: "Fools rush in where angels fear to tread".

[csa]

This is why playing poker against unskilled players is easy but not so much fun — you just consistently have to show down value because bluffs and bluff-inducing plays just aren’t understood by the lower-skilled opponents.

The biggest challenge for me when I play less-skilled players is to maintain a solid showdown game — it just gets boring compared to high-level play.