Whenever you look at the poker calculator profile statistics of your opponents you can often recognize quickly what sort of opponent you are up against. But do not forget that your particular strong opponents shall have the same data on you, and if you are a normal 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.

As soon as 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, because they could be the only ones who don’t know you just play strong cards. For everyone else at the table, you could be a very easy read.

In that sense, its crucial that you 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 below are a few useful tips for mixing up your play. Choose a favorite 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.

For example, 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 should the action is folded to me anywhere past early position, I will frequently put in a raise. Now you don’t 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 top hand. You can also use your poker calculator to help you make better decisions post-flop.

So let’s say you actually had a much better hand like AK off-suit and hit top pair with top kicker, where normally you will make the exact 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 may vary your bet size to another amount like for instance a pot size bet, every time you’ve got 2 red cards like AK of hearts or AK of diamonds. see 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 choose a certain hand to play as if it was another hand. Let’s say for 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 should do right? Whenever you go in to a hand with a betting strategy for a certain other hand, players tend to 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 will not work with you, you’ll 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 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 well wind up getting frustrated at your confusing play and walk right in to a big mistake against you in a later hand. Hope that helps you an element of deception to your game.