Mixing up your play

An article from one ofm y favorite bloggers

Can you never maximize profit in a hand because your opponents always seem to know when you’re holding the best of it and when you are bluffing? Playing predictably is something that all poker players have to worry about, as it pretty much kills any action we can expect from a hand. If the table sees you fold 12 hands in a row, and then turn up pocket aces in the hand you finally do play, you’re already sending a message that you are a very tight player and that when you are involved in a pot it’s because you have something like pocket aces, kings or AK.

Just sticking to a strict method of playing premium hands makes you very easy to read, but at the same time you might not want to play with mediocre cards because you feel you don’t have the ability to play them correctly. That’s fine, you can definitely stick to playing great cards the majority of the time, but you do need to learn to masquerade your style a little so that it isn’t always clear to your opponents what your doing.

One way to do this is simply to play more hands, especially when you have a big stack and the blinds are low. See a bunch of cheap flops and hopefully your rags will turn into a set and the rest of the table will see that you entered the pot with junk like J4 off suit. You don’t have to give the illusion that you’ll play any two cards, you just don’t want to come across as a single style player.

In tournaments this isn’t as important because you normally won’t be sitting with the exact same people any longer than a hour at a time and you have to open up your selection of hands rather quickly, as opposed to a cash game where the blinds are fixed all night and you can wait forever for pocket aces. Like I’ve said before, the best way to make money in poker is through maximizing the profits from every hand you win. You will often win more money with junk cards that are hard to detect that turn into monster hands than you will with pocket aces. Open up your hand selection a little, turn over some bad cards every once in awhile, and keep your opponents guessing at all times as to just what type of player you are