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Psychological Concepts:
Poker Strategy - Changing
Pace
Note: This is only for short
handed games (6 or fewer people) and to be used
mainly against other good players.
One thing that most people,
including myself at times, do wrong is play consistently.
In other words, though you may play your AQ different
preflop sometimes and when you hit a A or Q, you
may bet a different amount (in No-Limit) or choose
to jam the pot at a different time (in limit).
However, most decent players will be able to identify
you as a certain type of player: tight-aggressive,
very-tight aggressive, etc.
A way to help your earnings
is to simply switch up your play sometimes. This
way, when they're expecting that you're gonna
bluff, you bluff rarely so they'll call you more.
Likewise, if your bets are for value, you start
to bluff at the pot a lot. People generally won't
catch on if you do this discreetly, and it can
add more mystery to your play.
This strategy is obviously more
effective at No-Limit because it is much easier
to bluff at NL. However, it can be used at limit
as well. Generally, the game must be 5 or fewer
people (preferably 4 people total.) With stakes
large enough, you can effectively bluff at flop/turn
if you played it tight at first, and you will
receive more callers for big bets if you bluffed
earlier.
For those of you who are mathematically
inclined, I'll use some game theory to prove my
assertions. Suppose you are playing a soccer match
and you have a penalty kick. You predict that
if you kick left, you will have an 80% chance
of scoring if the goalie does not expect left,
and you have a 60% of scoring if you kick to the
right and the goalie does not expect right. However,
if the goalie blocks left and you kick left, you
only have a 45% chance of scoring, and if the
goalie blocks to the right, you will only score
35% of the time. Here's a matrix to quickly summarize:
Block
Left Right
Shoot Left: 45 80
Shoot Right: 60 35
As you can see, even though
shooting left may be what you are best at, it
is in your interest to shoot right from time to
time b/c if the goalie always knows you will shoot
left, you will score less than if you shot to
the right sometimes.
Now, instead of percent chance
of scoring, think of the numbers as hourly profit.
Left means playing your standard tight-aggressive
game and the right means playing a more loose
game. Bad players may not 'block' at all or will
always block the wrong way, so you can keep on
playing your standard tight-aggressive game and
earn 80 an hour. However, against good players,
they'll quickly realize what you are doing and
defend against it. Your profit drops down to 45
an hour.
Now, suppose you play tight-aggressive
(left) 70% of the time and looser (right) 30%
of the time. If they continue to just play against
you as if you were a tight aggressive all the
time, you will earn 49.5 an hour (.7 * 45 + .3
* 60).
Now, if your opponents caught
on to what you were doing and played you as a
tight-aggressive 80% of the time and a looser
player 20% of the time, your profit would actually
increase as long as they don't know exactly when
you were playing which way. Your profit would
be (.7)(.3) * 45 + (.3)(.7) * 80 + (.8)(.3) *
60 + (.2)(.3) * 35 =52.9
So, in order to defend against
changing pace, you need to know when they are
changing pace. Obviously, if they treated you
as a tight-aggressive 70% of the time and all
the time they treated you as a tight aggressive
you were one, your profit would drop. However,
as shown before, predicting a change of pace when
there is none will actually help the person who
is changing pace, so people generally will treat
you as the same even when you switch your style!
Thus, I recommend you change
your pace some, but randomize it so they can't
catch on and correctly predict when you vary your
style.
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