Playing Deceptively – Part 1: Defining Deception

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Lately I’ve been thinking about deception in poker, and I decided to write a modest series of articles describing my take on exactly what deception means and how to play in a deceptive way.

I think if you asked people to define what it means to play poker “deceptively” I think most of them would mention something about playing opposite of your hand strength. If you have a weak hand, you play it strongly or bluff. And if you have a strong hand, you play it weakly or slowplay.

I’ve never been comfortable with that definition of deception. One reason is that many times people are at their most transparent and readable exactly when they’re trying to be their most deceptive. For example, consider this hand.

It’s a 9-handed $2-$5 no-limit hold’em game. A player opens for $20 from early position. A middle position player calls, the button calls, and both blinds call. The flop comes

Q 7 6

The blinds check, and the early position player bets $40. The middle position player calls. The button raises to $100 with $500 behind. The blinds fold, the early position player folds, and the middle position player shoves for $600.

What does the middle position player have?

Stumped?

I hope not. He’s got a set. The tipoff is the “deceptive” way he played the flop.

The preflop raiser bet $40 into a $100 pot – not a particularly strong-looking play, but one you will often see in live games.

The middle position player flat called. This could be a wide range of hands from a straight draw to an unimproved pocket pair to middle or bottom pair to a queen to a monster hand.

The button then raises to $100. These small-sized bets and raises are fairly typical of many live games. The button probably has a queen with a decent kicker or better, or possibly he is bluffing with an open-ended straight draw.

The original raiser folds. He probably held an unimproved pocket pair or possibly an unpaired hand that he decided to c-bet.

Then the original flop caller decides to shove. This is a play most live game players would make only with a monster hand. If the stacks were shallower, perhaps $300 instead of $600, the middle position player might shove a good queen or better or possibly a straight draw he didn’t want to fold. But with stacks of this depth, the call-shove play very strongly suggests a flopped set.

The flop call is ostensibly “deceptive” because the player has flopped a strong hand but played it weakly. However the flop shove destroys all that deceptiveness by allowing anyone paying attention to narrow this player’s range down to two or three possible holdings.

In other words, the deception doesn’t last even one betting round, and it doesn’t last long enough to trick anyone into getting stacked either. So as an example of deceptive play, this hand is largely a failure.

Deception Applies Not To Individual Plays, But To Entire Strategies

I reject the entire distinction between a “straightforward” play and a “deceptive” one. If you make a big raise with a strong hand, you aren’t necessarily playing straightforwardly. And if you make a big raise with a weak hand, you aren’t necessarily playing deceptively. These labels are better used to describe entire strategies.

Your strategy encompasses your entire decision-making paradigm. It’s all those little internal rules in your head that you use to decide whether to raise, call, or fold.

A straightforward strategy is one that is, in general, fairly easy to read. In contrast, a deceptive strategy is one that’s very difficult to read. What makes a strategy easy or hard to read?

It’s all in the hand ranges. When your opponents are reading your hand, with each action in a pot they are (generally speaking) putting you on an incrementally narrower range of hands.

Say, for instance, that you are playing a hand against one opponent. You raise preflop, bet the flop, check and call the turn, and bet the river. Your strategy is what directed you to play the pot in this particular way. And, presumably, your strategy would direct you to play some set of your possible holdings this way, while playing the rest of the holdings some other way. The set of holdings you would play this way is your hand range.

In general, deceptive strategies will produce wide and balanced ranges for most common betting lines. Conversely, straightforward strategies will produce narrow and/or unbalanced ranges for many betting lines.

A wide range is a range that has many possible member holdings. A balanced range is a range whose member holdings span strengths and hand types. There are strong made hands, strong drawing hands, weak made hands, weak drawing hands, and bluffs all in the range. (In this case, a made hand is any hand that tends to have a polarized equity profile and a drawing hand tends to have a centered equity profile.) And each of these hand types occur in frequencies commensurate with the size of the pot – the larger the pot, the more commonly strong hands appear in the range.

You’re playing deceptively when you tend to have wide and balanced hand ranges. You’re playing straightforwardly when you don’t.

For instance, by this definition, a player who plays only pocket aces preflop plays extremely straightforwardly. Every time this player enters the pot, you know very precisely what hand they hold.

But a player who plays only 8-4 preflop plays just as straightforwardly. Even though they would be playing a weak hand strongly, there is no deception because their hand ranges are always narrow and unbalanced.

Also, a player who plays every hand aggressively to the river is also, in a way, straightforward. While the hand ranges are exceedingly wide, they also tend to be unbalanced toward weak hands. You can naively assume this player holds a weak hand, play accordingly, and perform quite well.

If you want to be deceptive, you should seek to keep your ranges wide and balanced. I’ll talk about how you can do that in future parts of the series.

Read Part 2: Reading Your Own Hand.

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