Playing Deceptively – Part 2: Reading Your Own Hand

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In Understanding Deception: Part 1 I introduced the notion of a deceptive strategy as opposed to a deceptive play. A slowplay by itself, for instance, cannot be deceptive because it is just one play. Indeed, if you slowplay habitually you will often end up with a strategy that is not deceptive at all.

A deceptive strategy is one that produces wide and balanced hand ranges for most common betting lines.

Most people don’t play deceptively. They play by a relatively simple set of rules and principles, and they often find themselves in situations where their opponents can know that they can never be bluffing, they can never have a strong hand, they can never have a drawing hand, and so forth.

As a simple example, many no-limit players virtually never three barrel bluff. If you never three barrel bluff, your strategy ends up being very straightforward every time you fire three times at a pot – you always have a strong made hand. This makes your range both narrow and unbalanced.

Sometimes people create narrow and unbalanced ranges that are bluffs far too often. In online 6-max games, a fair number of very loose and aggressive (bad) players like to bluff-raise a river bet if there was no action on the flop and turn.

For instance, two players see a flop for a raise. The flop and turn both get checked through. One player bets the river, and the other, a bad LAG, raises.

Depending on the exact board cards, this raise can nearly always be a bluff. The bad LAG would never check through a strong hand twice, and the river card isn’t one that is likely to have made a strong hand either. So either the bad LAG has a very unlikely holding, or the bad LAG just decided (once again) to try a bluff. Overall, the LAG’s hand range after this action is significantly unbalanced toward weak hands.

The best way to add deception to your game is to constantly read your own hand as you play. After nearly every decision, ask yourself, “What hands would I play this way?” Think of every hand you could have just as if you were trying to read your opponent’s hand. Don’t worry for now about what hands your opponent might think you could have. Just think of all the hands you could actually have after playing this way.

For simple hands, the chances are that your ranges are already fairly wide and balanced. If you play a solid, TAG game, your preflop raising range is probably plenty deceptive. You can have big pairs, you can have big unpaired cards, you can have small pairs, you can have suited connectors, and you can also have junk. Likewise, your continuation betting range in most cases is probably fairly deceptive. Merely seeing you bet the flop won’t give your opponent too much information about your hand.

But if you’re like most players, the more complex the betting in a hand gets, the more decision points there are, the more likely you are to be playing a straightforward (and exploitalbe) strategy. For instance, say you played the following hand:

It’s an online $0.25-$0.50 6-max game. You open for $1.50 from under the gun. Two players including the button call behind you, and the blinds fold.

The flop comes K T 5

You check, the middle player bets $2.50 into the $5.25 pot. The button folds, and you call.

The turn is the Q

You check, the other player bets $2 into the $10.25 pot, and you call.

What hands can you have? Can you have a king? Can you have a heart draw? How about a set or a straight?

If you were honest with yourself, you no doubt answered “no” to a few of the above questions. You likely would never play top pair like that, check-calling twice (including a 1/5 pot bet on the turn) after opening from under the gun. You probably also wouldn’t play a big hand like a set or a straight like that.

So this action produces a relatively narrow range of possible hands that is unbalanced toward weak holdings. I took this hand from the most recent Hand Discussion, and in that hand our hero held pocket jacks. I don’t like the way he played the hand, and one of the main reasons is that his action is too straightforward. He’s basically telling his opponent that he’s got a reason to stay in the pot, but overall he’s got a pretty weak hand.

Instead of choosing a betting line that produces a narrow and unbalanced range, I’d prefer that he choose a more deceptive betting line. He could bet the flop, which he would do with many hands. Or he could show strength by betting or check-raising the turn, which he could do both with strong hands and weakish made/drawing hands like pocket jacks.

For another somewhat similar example of creating a narrow and/or unbalanced range, check out my article Exploiting Limiting Turn Calls.

Ok, so you’re reading your hands as you play, and you find yourself playing a hand in a way that labels you with a narrow and unbalanced range. What do you do about it? You basically have two options:

1. Start playing more and different hands the same way
2. Start playing hands like this one a different way that is more deceptive

In other words, you need to adjust your strategy so that all the similar hands you play and all the times you use this betting line in the future become more deceptive.

I’ll offer some examples of doing this in the next part of the series.

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