An aspect of poker that has nothing to do with rules or tactics is that of projecting an image at the table. It is all about the impression that players give while indulging in the game. Your image consists of all you know about your opponents and all they know about you. It includes more than perception and bluffing. There may be some decisions surrounding it that seem odd or even erroneous.
Your opponents are attempting to analyze your every move or lack thereof. There are times when it is best to hide your image and times when it should be on display. Some will play with an image that obscures their thinking and actions and some will create a major display of activity with much vivacity and fanfare which can completely disorient and befuddle opponents.
Bluffing is usually a means to increase the bank in the course of a few more bets. By creating an image, we sacrifice a fraction of current potential benefits for the sake of far greater far-future benefits, benefits which may last the entire game and more than one game. We make a few weak moves in a specific situation. For this round, we may have lost something, but in similar future situations, when we again have a strong hand and can play well, competent but credulous opponents will tend to believe that you have the weaker hand, while more perceptive players will simply not know how to read you. A single false slip of this kind can establish long term effects and significantly increase the value of our strong hands.
Chess players employ image-based strategy quite a lot. Whether the player's strength is known to you or not he may make credible bad moves or even strange or stupid ones. He will sacrifice pieces, fail to protect his position, or to take positions. His opponent will be disoriented by his lousy play. The image-based player will then make a subtle sweep of valuable pieces or attack a weak point that no one even thought to be his focus.
The main idea is the same in both games: you sacrifice current advantage in order to seize greater advantage later in the game. Instead of playing every concrete hand the best way, you envision less palpable but likely future possibilities. The move seems for the present to have put you at a disadvantage, but the game allows you to recover later and when you are ready to recover with a vengeance, your image will be your primary means.
You need to learn to project a wide variety of images. You will educate yourself on which "bad" moves to make to reach which goal and with which image. You may wish to disorient your opponents only in certain situations involving certain of your skills. Or, you may want to impress upon them how weak your game really is, or that you are the perennial bluffer.
It is undoubtedly wiser to project whatever image you are choosing at the beginning of the game when the bank is low. If you try this when the bank has grown to a tidy sum, a few "bad" moves in a row can cost you more than you can win back at the end.
The author is a full time online poker player and makes the majority of his income from his online play and rakeback at Fortune Poker. To sign up for a Rakeback account of your own visit Rakeback Solution.
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