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What is a Callingstation?

Symptoms

Callingstations don’t just play too many starting hands; they even tend to call their weak hands on the flop/turn/river. Their biggest problem is that they make moves with a negative expected value and, with that, waste a lot of money.

They pretty much never raise pre-flop, putting their opponents in an excellent position. They don’t force the blinds to fold and regularly the big blind a free-play. Their calls enable draws to get into the pot for a low price. There are 3 players in the pot and drawings hands are quite safe to play against mid-pair raisers. Another advantage of playing callingstations is the possibility to isolate them with a bet. Callingstations tend to cold call trash hands such as KT and a lot weaker.

Their post-flop play pretty much consists of auto-check/calls. They don’t protect their strong hands and get beaten by drawing hands unnecessarily often. Plus, they don’t get enough value from their winning hands.

Basically, callingstations are not really creative or tricky. They pretty much never bluff and are easy to rumble. Bets and raises after the flop can be seen as monsters. With weak hands, you get an easy fold while you would have probably paid out more aggressive players. You won’t force callingstations to fold with a bet on the flop, but a bet on the turn might be the best thing against players who do not auto-call any hand.