Poker Articles

On Deception and Self-Deception: Part I
By Barry Tanenbaum

Conventional poker wisdom tells us that, if you play in a very straightforward manner, you will become easy to read. Your opponents will profit because they will be able to guess your starting hands.

To prevent them from reading you, you are supposed to vary your play. You should raise before the flop in early position sometimes with, say, small suited connectors. When your opponents see this, they will become confused, and suddenly start paying off your good hands because they will worry you might have one of the weak ones.

I am not going to say that conventional wisdom is totally wrong, because it is not. But there is a lot more to playing deceptively then simply playing bad hands before the flop. This article will explore several key principles regarding deception. By the way, I am discussing cash games only in this article.

Here are several things about deception that you need to think about. We will explore them in depth.

1. When you play deceptively, you are making a theoretical mistake (at least on this hand).

2. You must have a very good reason to vary your play. "It is time to vary my play" is not remotely good enough.

3. Varying your play does not necessarily mean playing weak hands strongly before the flop.

4. You should rarely practice deception by playing strong hands weakly.

5. Just like bluffing, you are still trying to win pots, not advertise your cleverness. Unless you are forced, do not show the deceptive hand.

This statement is not as bizarre as it sounds. You could actually consider it my least controversial topic in this article.

Straightforward, honest play provides us with the most profit. If you have a very good hand, you would like to raise with it until you are blue in the face. If you have a draw, you would like to call and see if you get there. (Yes, I know about free cards and current pot odds and stuff. Just go along with the premise here).

That is why it is called the straightforward (or correct) play. When you play deceptively, either playing a strong hand as weak, a weak hand as strong, slowplaying the nuts, raising before the flop without real values, you are doing something wrong.

You are doing it for a reason, of course. You are trying to keep your opponents guessing about what you have. But you would rather be able to play every hand in exactly the optimum way without worrying about that other stuff. If you could do that, and your opponents did not notice, you would make lots more money than you make by being deceptive.

An exception to this is bluffing, especially on the river, in which you are deceptively trying to win a pot you could not win any other way. So river betting, and pure bluffing in general, are topics I am excluding from this discussion.

Here is an example: You raise before the flop with KK, and are reraised by a player you can pretty well put on AA. The flop comes K52. You bet and get raised by a player behind you. You reraise and get raised again. Here you start to think, "If I put in another raise, I will be giving away the fact that I have three kings. I should smooth call, and try to raise later." This might work, and this might not work. (For example, the other player might smell a rat already and check behind you when you check the turn). The one thing you know for sure is that you are costing yourself at least one bet right now.

You must have a very good reason to vary your play. "It is time to vary my play" is not good enough by far.

If you buy the statements above, you will then agree that it must be a good idea to use deception sparingly. Against unaware opponents, you should not use deception at all. Just play your cards the best you can.

The reality is that playing straightforwardly, as rewarding as it might be, is not all that much fun. It is a whole lot more entertaining to make off-the-wall raises, be extra clever, and in general show down some unusual hands and take some extraordinary (brilliant) actions.

If you want to do this for your own amusement, fine. Just be aware that you are not practicing deception in that you are not tricking the opponents, who do not realize they are being tricked. Rather, you are practicing self-deception. You are convincing yourself that by varying your play, you are gaining money. In reality, you are losing money every time you do it.

Let's say you raise with AK and get two callers. The flop comes A84, you bet and they fold. Is this bad? Is it time to whip out a deceptive raise with 87s or start checking the flop when you have top pair? Almost certainly not! This time they did not have anything. Hey, it happens. You were forced to win a small pot.

If you are going to apply deception correctly, you must be able to state, clearly, to yourself, the correct play, the incorrect (deceptive) play you are about to make, and, most importantly, why you need to make this play at this time. "I have not raised with a bad hand for a long time" is not good enough. Neither is "I don't want to look too strong, as they all might fold".

Someone once asked me what to do with pocket aces under the gun if I knew that if I raised, there was an 85% chance that everyone would fold, including the blinds. My answer was to raise with the aces. However, I would also raise with all the other hands I was dealt until they stopped folding.

The above, in a nutshell, is a well-stated reason to be deceptive. You decide to raise with bad hands because your opponents are playing way too tightly, and you want them to loosen up. You do not want to give away my advantage in raising with aces, because you ought to refuse to give people a cheap shot at beating your premium hands, so elect to continue to play your strong hands strongly. This action will also exploit your opponents' tendency to fold too much by raising with weak hands, introducing well-reasoned deception. When the pendulum has swung the other way and the game has loosened up, you can revert to raising only with good hands only and throwing away the bad ones.

OK, you don't have to be that elaborate, but you get the general idea. You need to know why you're doing stuff in poker, and making a deceptive play is one of the most important times to do that. If you cannot explain a good reason to yourself, you should not make the deceptive play.

So far, we have looked at why to be deceptive, and when to be deceptive. In Part II of the article, we will spend some time on how to be deceptive.