Staying a Step Ahead (2 of 2)

Okay, so you’ve folded a bunch of hands, and likely all you have to show for it are lost antes or blinds. What have you gained? Hopefully by now, all of your opponents will feel comfortable with your style of play. They will assume that when you raise, you really have quite a hand, and they probably won’t give you much action unless they have a rather strong hand themselves. This is where you flip the script on their asses (sorry, the blackness in me seeped out a little bit … let me push it back down. There we are. Much better). You start to loosen up and play some weaker hands, and you play them fast … you bluff a little more often … and then you watch in amazement as players surrender their hands to you and the dealer shoves chips in your direction. You pick up a few pots this way, and you’re feeling good. Everyone at the table is a little bewildered and amazed that you’ve all of a sudden started catching a few monsters in a row. The tight play earlier on has paid off!!!

Until someone smells a rat.

After a few hands, a player or two at your table will grow suspicious. You’ve won a few pots, not necessarily back to back, but within a shorter time span than it took you to catch cards earlier. And you’ve won a few without showing down the hands. So the players begin to wonder if they’re being bluffed. And of course, their natural instincts begin to rise up inside them. As average poker players, they are genetically wired to want to call your bets. They’ve been resisting the desire for a while, because their rational side tells them that your bets are genuine representations of strong hands. But after they see so many chips slide your way, the calling instinct just becomes overwhelming. They pay to see if you really are as strong as you’re acting, even if their minds tell them their beat. So you get caught a few times. You lose a pot or two because you represented a flush you didn’t have, or because you bet strongly with a weak pair. The other player says “Aha! I knew you were bluffing! Well, you can’t fool me for long! I’ve been playing poker longer than you’ve been alive, sonny!”

So the jig is up right? You went way up in chips, and you’re still up now, but not as high as you were a few pots ago. And now the rest of the table realizes that you’re a big-time bluffer. You’re drawing dead … time for a table change. Right?

Not so fast. The game isn’t over just yet, because here is when you switch it up again. You stay one step ahead of your competition. Remember, just when they thought they had you pegged as a rock, you loosened up and took a few pots down that way. And now that they think they have you back, you once again cleverly elude capture. Now is when you tighten up again – not as tight as you started the game, but tighter than you’ve been playing of late. This is when you get the advertising value out of the times you got caught bluffing. The players at the table will think you’re bluffing more often, and call you down or raise you with weak hands. And you can bust them when you show them your monsters.

After this point, you’ve probably been in the game about an hour or so, and your playing style left is up to your discretion. You should have a pretty good feel of the table, and a pretty good read on the other players by now. When you’ve moved to the third stage in the formula (the return to tight play), you will have to use your judgment to find your playing style, based upon the playing styles of your opponents and the quality of cards you see. But the first three stages I have outlined will generally do well to get you started. As you can see, my method allows you to stay a step ahead of the other players, and forces them to guess which type of player you are (tight or loose). After the third stage, you can “change gears” as often as necessary.

This formula has more-or-less guaranteed me winning sessions at the $4-8 7-Card Stud tables at the Commerce Casino in Los Angeles. Try it on for size, and watch your bankroll grow.