Vary Your Style to Fit the Situation

Things are not always as they appear. We humans have a tendency to attach greater or lesser weight to different events based not on the inherent nature of the events but on the way those events affect us. Among other examples of this tendency, negative events impact our consciousness much more so than positive ones. Stick your hand in fire and you will remember it for life. In a poker context, an opponent three-betting us with 5-3 offsuit and winning a monster pot will register more strongly than our aces holding up two laps later. This tendency has powerful applications in the use of deception as a tool in your poker game.

Sometimes, a statistical fluctuation can give the illusion that an event will or will not occur at the frequency that it is statistically supposed to occur. Such fluctuations take place all the time, and to a player who doesn't understand either the concepts or the statistics of poker, these fluctuations can cause him to have very skewed perspectives about poker. This is also true in life's perspectives, if you either surround yourself with only one type of person or hang out in only one subculture (such as the poker subculture, for instance).

As poker players, we need to utilize these truths in our poker games. During my Seattle days, early in my poker career, I picked a hand to use for the sole purpose of deceiving my opponents and causing them to think incorrectly. I chose the queen with a trey, the "waitress hand," at random. I always played Q-3! Whenever I turned it over, it made a powerful mental impression on my opponents. It appeared to me that I won money overall when playing the hand. I was amazed at how many pots I actually won with it, and it gave me a lot of value in creating the misperception within my opponents that I could have anything, thereby making me more difficult to read. David Sklansky has written that he did something similar with 8-3 (suited or not), and always played the hand the same way that he played aces.

Players who play too predictably often have much worse results than those who play too many hands. You create positive expectation when your opponents make mistakes against you. The more mistakes you can induce your opponents to make, the higher your expectation will be. If your opponents can define your hand with reasonable accuracy, they are going to make the right play against you much more often than not. I see many players who consistently play "by the book" against aware and creative opponents continuously getting outplayed. Their opponents crush them with their proficient hand-reading accuracy. In their own minds, as a result of their lack of understanding, these losing players think they are playing well and are just very unlucky people.

That said, you need to play poker in such a manner that your opponents cannot accurately predict your holding. In some poker games, there is no point in playing a hand other than optimally, since your opponents are not paying any attention to anything anyway. Making deceptive plays in those games will just cost you the expectation lost in making the incorrect play and will not change the perceptions or play of your opponents. Many players, in fact, overdo deception, and play far too many hands out of the range of positive expectation in an effort to induce action. Often, they just create a lot of big pots in which their opponents are correct in going to the river, having been manipulated into getting the right price. This eliminates a lot of profitable bluffing plays and stops opponents from folding incorrectly. Because of this, these players tend to get sucked out on more than their fair share, generally by players chasing mathematically correct draws. Often, this same player is one who is emotionally affected by bad beats and goes on tilt. This results in the deception grand strategy being inconsistent with such a player's emotional makeup, and a losing proposition overall.

So, how does a player design the best overall strategy for deception? By analyzing the independent situation at the moment and adjusting your play to the composition of the players involved. The best image is one that causes your opponents to think they can predict your playing patterns, but they are mistaken. That makes a rich assortment of very profitable plays available to you that are not available to your opponents. It is not always good for your ego to have people underestimate your poker game – however, it is very good for your bankroll. You can make deception plays against players who put a strong emphasis on reading hands. You can confuse them, and cause them to make mistakes that they would not make against other players, thereby increasing your positive expectation against them. On the other hand, you should play a straightforward style against players who are either unaware or incapable of effectively reading hands; spend nothing on deceptive play, as playing your hand less than optimally gives up edge that cannot be recaptured, let alone exceeded, given the texture of the field.

Many poker authors have made the statement that you should lose money on your bluffs, and by doing so, you will more than make up for it by being deceptive and thereby increasing the calls you will receive when you have a bit mitt. There is some truth to that concept, but there is an even better way. By varying your play based on the situation at the moment, you create expectation by using deception when you most need deception, and don't needlessly cost yourself expectation when it has little or no value.

Editor's note: Roy Cooke has played winning professional poker for 16 years. He is a successful real estate broker/salesperson in Las Vegas.