When you look at the poker calculator profile statistics of your opponents you may often recognize rather quickly which kind of opponent you are up against. But do not forget that your strong opponents will have the same data on you, and if you’re an average tight-aggressive player their very 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.

When you learn the basic principles 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, while they could be the only ones who do not know you just play strong cards. For everybody else at the table, you could be a very easy read.

In that sense, its important to mix up your play as a way 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 great thing. So here are a few useful tips for mixing up your play. Choose a well liked hand that you always raise with. Use the colors of your cards to dictate the amount to raise. And play a hand like it was another hand altogether.

For instance, one of my favorite hands is ten-eight suited, and I often raise with that hand to mix up my play. Now I won’t get silly with it and reraise, but in the event the action is folded to me anywhere past early position, I will frequently put in a raise. Now you do not need to get caught in reraising battles with your favorite hand, but more often than not, some opponents will call your raise, and after that you may play the flop with a continuation bet just as if you still had the most effective 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 same size of bet from around 2/3rds the pot. 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 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, best gambling 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 select a certain hand to play as if it was another hand. Let’s say by way of example you choose 6-5 suited and also you decide every time you get that hand you will play it like Ace King. So with a floip like 8K2, even though you’ve got nothing really you bet out because if you had Ace King, well that’s what you should do right? When you go in to a hand with a betting strategy for the specific other hand, players have a tendency to put you on the hand that 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 in the event the play does not work for you, you may need to be able to keep the pot size under control, and always have an exit plan when another player reraises you and can make it too expensive. Whenever you go to the river or are heads up, show your cards once in awhile but do not offer any other information. Players may well wind 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.