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

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

In that sense, its 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 the best 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 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 will not 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 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 may play the flop with a continuation bet just as if you still had the very best hand. You can also use your poker calculator to help you make better decisions post-flop.

So let’s say you truly 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 at about 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 for 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 excellent online 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 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 have nothing really you bet out because if you had Ace King, well that is what you should do right? Whenever you go in to a hand with a betting strategy for a specific other hand, players often 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 once they have no idea what you are playing. But in the event the play doesn’t work for you, you will 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 costly. When you go to the river or are heads up, show your cards once in awhile but don’t offer some other information. Players may very well find yourself getting frustrated at your confusing play and walk right in to a big mistake against you in a later hand. Hope that can help you an element of deception to your game.