There have been some poker forum posts recently regarding different plays by pretty well known players, we’ll call him Player X. Often, the poster finds the play questionable and wants to find out why Player X made that decision. These plays often look very, very bad on the surface. It's generally a hand where we find Player X calling with terrible hands (often for most or all of their chips) or pushing with even WORSE hands.

Inevitably, someone defends the play and someone else says "if the hand was played this way by a nobody, you’d say it was a terrible play. You're only defending the play because it was player X". You know what I say to that? YOU'RE RIGHT! IMO, the results of a hand almost don’t matter. What matters is the thought process behind a call or a shove. This means that two players could make the EXACT same move and I might call one a donkey and one a genius.

If one player calls all his chips off with A-7, because he thinks he might be ahead of an early position shover's hand...I might call that a donkey move. If another person calls off all his chips with A-7 because the pot is paying 4.3:1 and he is likely not more than a 4:1 dog, plus he is a better player than the others at his table, so if he wins the hand it will give him a chip lead and a HUGE advantage for the rest of the tourney...I might call him a genius...even though its the EXACT SAME PLAY.

Now, I'm not saying that very good players never make a bad move, we ALL make bad moves sometimes. But what looks like a bad move at first, isn’t necessarily so. It's very, very hard to judge if something is a bad play, without listening to the reasoning behind it. Luckily it often happens on the forum that this good player will respond to a thread with his reasoning for playing the hand. And that’s what makes it great!