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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.

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.

Put more simply, if your opponent keeps checking and calling, eventually you can be fairly sure they don’t have the nuts. They have “limited” the strength of their hand. Use can use that knowledge against them.

Here’s a hand I played recently where I used my opponent’s limited range to identify a profitable bluffing opportunity.

I was in a live $2-$5 game. One player limped in under the gun, and then a tight, but generally not too aggressive, player made it $25 to go. (This raise size was typical for the game, and I thought my opponent could have a range of hands that included big and medium pocket pairs, big-card hands such as A-T and K-Q, and possibly suited connectors or suited aces.) Two loose players called, and I called on the button with 9 9 . The blinds and the limper folded. We were four-handed to the flop in a $112 pot.

The flop came A J 5 . The preflop raiser bet $45, the two loose players folded, and the action was on me.

At this point we each had about $700 remaining. I interpreted my opponent’s less than half-pot bet size to indicate possible (but not at all certain) weakness. I decided to call for a few reasons:

1. I thought my opponent could hold an unimproved pocket pair such as tens or queens. With an ace on board, I thought it would be easy to force him off such a hand.
2. With two hearts and two Broadway cards on the flop, the turn and river were relatively likely to bring at least one scare card. So if my opponent flopped an ace, frequently I would get the opportunity to push my opponent off of his hand. Often it’s not wise to try to push someone off top pair, but in this case the stacks were deep enough and my opponent tight enough that I thought it would work fine.
3. While I would have only two outs if behind, there was still some chance I could catch a miracle set and win a big pot from it. Since I held the 9 , either remaining nine would give me a hand I would be happy to play hard for value.
4. It was possible I held the best hand, and if so, my position would give me the advantage and allow me to win the majority of those pots.
5. My opponent had bet less than half the pot, so it was fairly cheap for me to see a turn card and reevaluate the situation.

I called. The turn was the interesting J , pairing the board and also completing a possible flush. My opponent reacted poorly to the card and checked. I bet $150 into the $202 pot. I chose this size for two main reasons:

1. I wanted the bet to be big enough to get my opponent off any marginal hands like a pair of kings.
2. I wanted to leave the correct amount in our stacks for an effective river bluff. If my opponent were to call my $150, we’d each have roughly $500 left on the river, and the pot would also be roughly $500. A pot-sized all-in bluff would likely be sufficient to get my opponent off all but some very strong hands.

My opponent hemmed and hawed for a bit and then called. His mannerisms suggested true weakness, not faked weakness. The river was the 3 , an innocuous card. My opponent checked. I moved all-in. Why?

My opponent limited his hand range by calling the turn bet and checking the river. With a flush or full house, I would have expected this player to have bet the turn, to have check-raised the turn, or to have bet the river. He caught a potentially scary turn card and passed on three opportunities to get value for his hand. An exceptionally tricky player might do that with a flush, but most players wouldn’t. I played the odds and assumed that this betting sequence was limiting.

In my opinion, my opponent was limited by his actions to a hand no better than K-J. Because he called my turn bet, he likely held at least an ace (though a drawing hand such as K Q was also possible). It was significantly more likely that my opponent held an ace than a jack for a few reasons:

1. Three aces remained in the deck while only two jacks remained.
2. He raised preflop and bet the flop, and I would expect him to make both actions more often holding an ace than holding a jack.
3. He chose a very passive betting line after the turn card came. He might have been more aggressive if he held a jack.

I thought this opponent would lay an ace down in this situation to an all-in bet nearly every time. He wasn’t going to risk going broke to my “obvious flush” even with A-K on this scary board. In fact, I thought he might even fold trips. I didn’t expect him to fold trips, but on multiple occasions in similar situations I’ve had opponents fold trips face-up. So it was possible.

I thought my opponent would fold the significant majority of the time, and therefore my roughly even-money bluff would show a profit. Indeed, he did fold.

I was fairly certain that my opponent was limited in this hand both because of his betting pattern and because of his mannerisms. If I had to rely on the betting pattern alone, I wouldn’t have been quite as certain. Absent the tells, my opponent could have possibly bet the same way holding true monsters like quad jacks, aces full, or jacks full of aces. Sometimes players make seemingly strange checks and play very passively when they think they have the deck crushed.

But even if you’re not 100 percent sure your opponent’s hand range is limited, you can often still find good bluffs. After all, you’re not looking for a sure thing. It’s okay if you get caught sometimes. You just need an edge. When your opponent’s hand range is limited mostly to hands you think they’ll fold, a well-executed bluff will usually have the dealer pushing you the pot.

[This article appeared in the November 19, 2008 issue (Vol. 21, No. 23) of Card Player.]

video #480.
Ed plays four tables of 25NL on Full Tilt. The video is aimed at microstakes players. Concepts presented include very aggressive blind stealing from the button and a river value min-raise. [Description of one of my Stoxpoker videos.]

you comment on not giving these [nitty] players any action, because you arent going to get much yourself. can you explain this to me a bit further. for some reason im not really “getting” the idea behind this statement. What do you mean by this?

i have a habit at this level of going broke on dry boards with hands like TPTK, 2 pair, (these are my major losers, and why im having trouble). ive recently started playing Pot Limit holdem on FullTilt, and having reasonable success, however still not the results i want to achieve. I also find myself really stat dependant, any ideas to get around this???

maybe you can give me some tips on how to reduce my losses with the above types of hands. i dont want to be calling a lot of pot/pot bets on the turn and river as that gets a bit expensive for the type of holding i have. but for whatever reason im unable to let them go. is there something i need to be thinking about when I get into these types of situations? i know its player dependant, but when is 2 pair good enough to play for stacks? I never like playing top pairs for stacks (though im guilty sometimes of doing it hehe).

Well, your question is a complex one. Top pair and medium-strength two pair hands are sometimes not so great to get your money in with, and sometimes you should beat your opponent into the pot with them. To tell what from what is all about hand reading, which is a mixture of knowing your opponent’s playing tendencies and reading the texture of the board/situation.

I’d suggest taking another look at the example hand from the video where I had AK and paid off to the river.

Full Tilt, $1/$2 NL Hold’em Cash Game, 5 Players
Hand History Converter by Stoxpoker

SB: $228.35 (114.2 bb)
BB: $333.75 (166.9 bb)
MP: $139.90 (70 bb)
CO: $200 (100 bb)
Hero (BTN): $318.70 (159.4 bb)

Pre-Flop: Hero is BTN with A K
MP folds, CO raises to $7, Hero calls $7, SB folds, BB calls $5

Flop: ($22) 5 A 3 (3 players)
BB checks, CO bets $18, Hero calls $18, BB calls $18

Turn: ($76) T (3 players)
BB checks, CO bets $58, Hero calls $58, BB folds

River: ($192) 6 (2 players)
CO bets $117 and is all-in, Hero calls $117

Results: $426 pot ($3 rake)
CO showed J K (a flush, King high) and won $423 ($223 net)
Hero mucked A K (a pair of Aces) and lost (-$200 net)

I talk about this hand in detail on the Stoxpoker video referenced above. The short story is that my opponent was an extremely nitty player (6-max preflop stats like 13/8 if I recall), and I was on some take a stand tilt when I played the hand. (In fact, I managed to screw up on every street, and it’s probably the worst hand I’ve played all year.) Against this player, I can lay the hand down fairly easily on the turn when he comes out firing on the flush card, and it’s a no-brainer river laydown.

That was a really bad payoff because my opponent was super nitty and because there was a prominent flush on board. Those two factors combined made it very unlikely my opponent was trying to value bet something that my one pair hand could beat.

Here’s a good test. If your opponent makes a big bet and you have a hand that you think is probably no good, but you don’t feel like you can let it go, ask yourself two questions:

1. Could my opponent be value betting a hand that I beat? Try to think of legitimate hands your opponent could be trying to bet for value that you have beaten. Often they are hard to come up with if you are realistic about your opponents’ play style (because many players tend to be wusses and don’t value bet their decent, but not great, hands).

2. Could my opponent be bluffing… and if he’s bluffing, what sort of hand is he likely to have given the way the hand has played out. I’m talking about busted flush draws, busted straight draws, etc. When opponents shove on you on the river, they typically either have a great hand or their bluffing – those in-between hands get checked down or get small value bets. So think about what bluffs are reasonable.

If you can’t come up with hands your opponent is value betting that you beat, and there aren’t a lot of obvious busted draws or other hands he could have that have no value now, well your top pair or so-so two pair are probably no good and you can fold.