Mixing up your play in Texas Holdem

When you look at the poker calculator profile statistics of your opponents you can often recognize rather quickly what type of opponent you are up against. But don't forget that your strong opponents will have the same data on you, and if you are a typical tight-aggressive player their own poker software will show that too. So you should incorporate strategies in your game that will skew those statistics, resulting in confusion about your true profile.

Once you learn the basics of poker, you will inevitably have to learn how to be deceptive and confuse your opponents. Lets face it, playing a straight up book game may only win you money from players with less experience than you, because they might be the only ones who don't know you just play strong cards. For everyone else at the table, you might be an easy read.

In that sense, its important to mix up your play in order to confuse your opponents, especially those that use poker calculators to track your actions. Confusing your opponents leads them to make mistakes - that’s a good thing. So here are some useful tips for mixing up your play - choose a favorite hand that you always raise with, use the colors of your cards to dictate how much to raise, and play a hand like it was another hand altogether.

So here is one of my favorite hands - ten-eight suited, that I often raise with to mix up my play. Now I won’t get silly with it and reraise, but if the action is folded to me like in this hand - I will frequently raise in this position.

You don’t want to get caught in reraising battles with your favorite hand, but more often than not, some opponents will call your raise, and then you can play the flop with a continuation bet just as if you still had the best hand. You can also use your poker calculator to help you make better decisions post-flop.

So let’s say you actually had a much better hand and hit top pair with top kicker, where normally you would make the same size of bet at about 2/3rds the pot just like in this hand. Well to mix up your play and confuse opponents, when you want to lead out and bet you can vary your bet size to another amount like for instance a pot size bet, every time you have 2 red cards like you do here. This way, you will be betting different amounts in a random pattern, but it wont take any extra brain power on your part to inject some unpredictability into your play.

Anther way to mix up your strategy is to pick a certain hand to play as if it was another hand. Let’s say for this session you choose 65suited and you decide every time you get that hand you will play it like Ace King. So here, even though you have nothing really you bet out because if you had Ace King, well that’s what you would do right? When you go into a hand with a betting strategy for a certain other hand, players tend to put you on the hand that is representative of your actions, not your actual hand.

Confusing your opponents can result in huge pots for you when they have no idea what you are playing. But when the play doesn’t work for you, you need to be able to keep the pot size under control, and always have an exit plan when another player reraises you and makes it too expensive. When you go to the river or are heads up, show your cards once in awhile but don’t offer any other information. Players may very well end up getting frustrated at your confusing play and walk right into a big mistake against you in a later hand. Hope that helps you an element of deception to your game.