Whenever you look-at the poker calculator profile statistics of your opponents you can often recognize in short order what kind of opponent you are up against. But do not forget that the strong opponents shall have the same data on you, and if you’re an average tight-aggressive player their own poker software will show that too. So you should incorporate strategies in your game that can skew those statistics, resulting in confusion about your true profile.

As soon as you learn the basic principles of poker, you will inevitably have to discover ways to be deceptive and confuse your opponents. Lets face it, playing a straight up book game could possibly win you money from players with less experience than you, while they could be the only ones who do not know you just play strong cards. For everyone else at the table, you could be a simple read.

In that sense, its very important to mix up your play to be able to confuse your opponents, especially those that use poker calculators to track your actions. Confusing your opponents leads them to make mistakes – that is a good thing. So here are several useful tips for mixing up your play. Choose a popular 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.

As an example, one of my favorite hands is ten-eight suited, and I often raise with that hand to mix up my play. Now I will not get silly with it and great online gambler reraise, but should the action is folded to me anywhere past early position, I will frequently put in a raise. Now you do not 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 really had a much better hand like AK off-suit and hit top pair with top kicker, where normally you would make the exact same size of bet from around 2/3rds the pot. Well to mix up your play and confuse opponents, whenever you want to lead out and bet you can vary your bet size to another amount like by way of example a pot size bet, every time you’ve got 2 red cards like AK of hearts or AK of diamonds. This way, you will be betting different amounts in a random pattern, but it wont take any extra brain power on your side 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 as an example you choose 6-5 suited and you decide every time you get that hand you will play it like Ace King. So with a floip like 8K2, despite the fact that you’ve got nothing really you bet out because if you had Ace King, well that’s what you will do right? Whenever you go in to a hand with a betting strategy for a certain other hand, players have a tendency to put you on the hand which is representative of your actions, not your actual hand.

Confusing your opponents can bring about huge pots for you when they have no idea what you are playing. But when the play will not work with 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 causes it to be very costly. Whenever 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 find yourself 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.