Psychological Concepts:

Poker Strategy - Changing Pace

Note: This is only for short handed games (6 or fewer people) and to be used mainly against other good players.

One thing that most people, including myself at times, do wrong is play consistently. In other words, though you may play your AQ different preflop sometimes and when you hit a A or Q, you may bet a different amount (in No-Limit) or choose to jam the pot at a different time (in limit). However, most decent players will be able to identify you as a certain type of player: tight-aggressive, very-tight aggressive, etc.

A way to help your earnings is to simply switch up your play sometimes. This way, when they're expecting that you're gonna bluff, you bluff rarely so they'll call you more. Likewise, if your bets are for value, you start to bluff at the pot a lot. People generally won't catch on if you do this discreetly, and it can add more mystery to your play.

This strategy is obviously more effective at No-Limit because it is much easier to bluff at NL. However, it can be used at limit as well. Generally, the game must be 5 or fewer people (preferably 4 people total.) With stakes large enough, you can effectively bluff at flop/turn if you played it tight at first, and you will receive more callers for big bets if you bluffed earlier.

For those of you who are mathematically inclined, I'll use some game theory to prove my assertions. Suppose you are playing a soccer match and you have a penalty kick. You predict that if you kick left, you will have an 80% chance of scoring if the goalie does not expect left, and you have a 60% of scoring if you kick to the right and the goalie does not expect right. However, if the goalie blocks left and you kick left, you only have a 45% chance of scoring, and if the goalie blocks to the right, you will only score 35% of the time. Here's a matrix to quickly summarize:

Block

Left Right

Shoot Left: 45 80

Shoot Right: 60 35

As you can see, even though shooting left may be what you are best at, it is in your interest to shoot right from time to time b/c if the goalie always knows you will shoot left, you will score less than if you shot to the right sometimes.

Now, instead of percent chance of scoring, think of the numbers as hourly profit. Left means playing your standard tight-aggressive game and the right means playing a more loose game. Bad players may not 'block' at all or will always block the wrong way, so you can keep on playing your standard tight-aggressive game and earn 80 an hour. However, against good players, they'll quickly realize what you are doing and defend against it. Your profit drops down to 45 an hour.

Now, suppose you play tight-aggressive (left) 70% of the time and looser (right) 30% of the time. If they continue to just play against you as if you were a tight aggressive all the time, you will earn 49.5 an hour (.7 * 45 + .3 * 60).

Now, if your opponents caught on to what you were doing and played you as a tight-aggressive 80% of the time and a looser player 20% of the time, your profit would actually increase as long as they don't know exactly when you were playing which way. Your profit would be (.7)(.3) * 45 + (.3)(.7) * 80 + (.8)(.3) * 60 + (.2)(.3) * 35 =52.9

So, in order to defend against changing pace, you need to know when they are changing pace. Obviously, if they treated you as a tight-aggressive 70% of the time and all the time they treated you as a tight aggressive you were one, your profit would drop. However, as shown before, predicting a change of pace when there is none will actually help the person who is changing pace, so people generally will treat you as the same even when you switch your style!

Thus, I recommend you change your pace some, but randomize it so they can't catch on and correctly predict when you vary your style.