[kevinventullo]

I don’t follow; can’t you play conservatively until you have a great hand and bet accordingly? If the other players are loose, they’ll call with anything.

If they observe you are doing this and don’t play so loose against you, then I would take issue with the claim that they are not playing seriously.

[nimbleal]

You could wait until you have the nuts, but that might never happen. If you play too conservatively you risk just leaking blinds until you have nothing left, and because almost everyone goes in on almost every hand, you're playing against quite diminished odds that you're going to have the best hand.

Perhaps an excellent player might be able to crack the code (or at least be up over the course of enough games), but I'm not an excellent player.