By Tony Guerrera

When you find an effective line of play, it’s tempting to ride it until the wheels fall off. Examples include:

1.) Raise preflop; continuation bet flop

2.) Limp from the button in an unraised pot; bet every time your opponents check to you

3.) Steal under-the-gun with a preflop raise

4.) Call a habitual continuation bettor’s preflop raise when you have position; call the suspected continuation bet on the flop; bluff on the turn if your opponent checks to you

These and many other lines of play that are tempting to abuse involve brute force. Be aggressive or go home cry the pundits! Well, once again, I’m shooting the pundits down. Knowing how to bet, bet, and bet some more is important, but your game needs other dimensions. Without other dimensions, your opponents can find ways to exploit you.

Of course, you can go too far in the other direction. In trying to change your game up, maybe you become unilaterally passive. An aggressive player raises, and you call him down to the river any time you have one pair or greater. Eventually, this aggressive player will catch on, and when he does, you won’t be able to get value from your made hands no matter what you do!

You need to keep your opponents leaning the wrong way to be an effective player. The key to this is making sure that balance is part of your game plan. Two approaches are possible for achieving this balance. To be really good, you’ll need to master both:

1.) Employ a fixed strategy that’s mixed

2.) Constantly oscillate between several strategies

Employ a Fixed Strategy That’s Mixed

Implementing a strategy means having an action for every situation you encounter. When many players start out, they look for a magic formula that tells them what to do in every situation; they want to know what hands to raise with under the gun, what hands to defend blinds with, when it’s proper to check-raise, etc. This magic formula that players seek is a fixed strategy where every situation corresponds to exactly one action.

A mixed strategy on the other hand is one where you do different things given the same situation. For example, if you have AA under the gun, maybe you’ll raise 80% of the time and look to limp reraise 20% of the time. Even if your strategy is fixed, it’ll be very difficult for your opponents to deduce the probabilistic weights of your actions-especially given the small sample set of situations they’ll have to work with versus the possible sample space of all possible actions.

Besides being tough for your opponents to deduce, a mixed strategy also gets your opponents leaning in the wrong direction because of associations they make regarding your play. First, they associate actions with situations. If your opponents see you semibluff a flush draw on the flop, your opponents will assume that you always semibluff flush draws. The next time you raise on a two-toned flop, your opponents are more apt to give you action. They don’t necessarily ignore the possibility that you can have something other than a flush draw. But future raises on two-toned flops will induce your opponents to include flush draws in your hand distribution. Second, they associate situations with actions. If your opponents see you semibluff a flush draw once, your opponents will think that you always semibluff your flush draws. If you play a flush draw passively on a future hand, you may be able to catch your opponents off guard for some nice implied odds.

Constantly Oscillate Between Several Fixed Strategies

Unless you’re fortunate enough to be playing the most thickheaded players in the world, your opponents will be making adjustments in response to your play. The point of implementing a fixed, but mixed, strategy is to prevent your opponents from converging to profitable adjustments. Another way of approaching the problem is to make continual adjustments in response to your opponents’ adjustments.

You sit down in a no-limit hold’em game, and you immediately begin banging away when you’re in position. Eventually, your opponents start fighting back against your continual button abuse. At this point, a gear change is in order. An effective possibility is to begin limping in situations where you’d normally raise. Limping prevents you from being singled out heads-up postflop. Additionally, it makes it look like you’re not focused on stealing the pot. And guess what you can do when your opponents think that you’ve shifted away from bully mode? You can bully them! When your opponents are fighting back a lot when you raise preflop, your flop bets in pots that were unraised preflop will tend to carry more fold equity than your flop bets in pots that you raised preflop-despite having more traffic to fight through. The key is position and ruthlessly seizing the initiative when all your opponents check to you.

Of course, if you go to this line of play too many times, your opponents will start playing back at you postflop no matter what you do preflop. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but if you think it’ll be a bad thing, you need to know when to shift away from abusing position in unraised pots. Maybe you oscillate back to heavy preflop raising-especially if some new players joined the table. Maybe oscillate to a third playing style by sitting back and playing very straightforward, tight-aggressive, hit-to-win poker for a while.

Increase Your Fold Equity and Your Implied Odds

If your approach is balanced, you’ll get your opponents to make two mistakes against you. First, they’ll fold hands like second pair-or even top pair with a weak kicker-when they have you beaten. Second, your opponents will commit too many chips when they have top pair. Put another way, you’re getting your opponents to fold hands that aren’t likely to give you substantial action. And you’re getting your opponents to commit more chips than usual with hands that they’ll either win small pots or lose big pots with. At this point, you’ll still have to wait patiently and attentively for the right opportunities, but you’ve put yourself in a great position to rake in the profits.

Tony Guerrera is the author of Killer Poker By The Numbers and Killer Poker Shorthanded (with John Vorhaus).

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