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Part VI: Table Image
I talked briefly about table
image in the Beginner's Mistakes to Avoid section, but I want to
expand on it here because its such an important part of the game.
In the same way that I've been teaching you to make inferences
about the strength of other players hands based on the behavior of
their play-they will also be making inferences about the strength of
your hand based on your own past behavior. If they see you as
being a looser, more aggressive player then they will tend to call you
more often when you bet or raise-you will get more action. When
they see you as being a tight, conservative player they will tend to
fold to your bets and raises more often.
The ideal image to
have however is neither one of those. The ideal image to have is
"unpredictable". To get that type of image you have to mix your
play up enough so that your opponents just don't know what to expect
when you make a bet-this will cause them to make mistakes against you,
it will cause them to act from guessing rather than from sound
observations which show some predictability. The trick here is,
in doing that, in mixing up your play, you should not deviate from the
course of statistically good play too much, too often. You must
learn to spot ideal opportunities for making these types of plays, and
take advantage of them.
You might sit down at a table and play
the first few rounds very tight, playing only a few hands with good
cards-then out of nowhere raise pre-flop from P5 with mid-level suited
connectors, and the very next hand from P6 with a small pocket pair,
making aggressive moves with hands that have at least some chance of
hitting the flop, or otherwise working out. If you are giving up
only a few percentage points from what you would normally do to
establish the fact that you are a dangerous and unpredictable player,
then it is well worth it because you will cause your opponents to
misread you down the line.
However, becoming a "maniac",
going crazy, is not a good way to do this. If you deviate too
far, too often, from tight aggressive strategy, you are simply going
to get picked off by good, patient players with superior hands.
The other incorrect way to do this is to make passive calls with
poor or mediocre hands from poor or mediocre table positions.
Doing that won't tell your opponents anything about you except that
you are a bad player. All your actions in this regard must be
carried out in the form of aggressive moves, usually from mid to late
position. So maybe in making these plays you're giving up a
little of hand strength, or a little of position strength, but the
aggressive aspect of your play will help to compensate for that, so
even as you establish yourself as an unpredictable player, the moves
that you are making to do so have at least a decent chance of working
out in themselves.
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