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

Once you learn the basics 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 may possibly win you money from players with less experience than you, because they may be the only ones who don’t know you just play strong cards. For everybody else at the table, you could be a simple read.

In that sense, its vital 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 great 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 just how much to raise. And play a hand like it was another hand altogether.

By way of 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 reraise, but if 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 frequently than not, some opponents will call your raise, and after that you can play the flop with a continuation bet just as if you-still had the top hand. You may also use your poker calculator to help you make better decisions post-flop.

So let’s say you really had a better hand like AK off-suit and hit top pair with top kicker, where normally you would make the same size of bet reviews over at Marlan about 2/3rds the pot. Well to mix up your play and confuse opponents, when you want to lead out and bet you may vary your bet size to another amount like for instance a pot size bet, every time you have 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 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, 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 into a hand with a betting strategy for a certain other hand, players usually put you on the hand that’s representative of your actions, not your actual hand.

Confusing your opponents can cause 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 makes it very costly. When you go to the river or are heads up, show your cards once in awhile but don’t offer every other information. Players may very 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.