Lose the pick ‘n’ mix

Poker players are always being told they need to ‘mix up’ their game. It’s lazy advice bandied about by all levels of player, but what exactly does ‘mixing it up’ mean? A mistake many players make is to assume it means introducing an element of randomness into their play. They reason that it is important to be hard to read in poker and the ultimate defence against a read is to make some of their plays random ones.

If you are completely outclassed in a game there may be a case for being random rather than trying to be clever, but to be honest your best strategy would be to keep sticking it all in pre-flop with a range of values that go up as your stack goes down. This is highly non-random, highly readable and still not easy to find a big overlay against. But if you are the better player, randomness is always a poor choice.

THE INVISIBLE MAN

Adding randomness does make your basic style less visible. If your preference is to only raise under the gun with Q-Q or better then raising with other hands hides that style. If you would rather take a free card than bet your draw, the occasional semi-bluff will likewise hide this fact (assuming it fails and is revealed).

If you want to be truly, inscrutably random, you’ll raise under the gun with whatever cards you’re holding the next time you see a player scratch their neck, or semi-bluff the next draw after someone says a word beginning with ‘z’ and so on. If you’re committed to ‘mixing it up’ you’ll make these bets even if you think it will lose you money in this pot. You are hoping that what you lose now will be less damaging than the longer-term liability of an identified style of play.

Injecting randomness into your game is an attempt to increase expectation in the long run. It is a strategic measure to defend against being exploited, but it gives you no expectation in a given hand. And I would argue that on a given hand you should do whatever you think will give you the best return.

If you think the guy is going to call you if you semi-bluff, then even if you checked the last 400 flops, the correct action is to check again, not to semi-bluff to ‘mix it up’. But that’s not to say you will always play the same way in a given situation – far from it. Your basic style, for example, may be never to lead out with a semi-bluff with two players still to act. But once you’ve bet out a few times with a made hand here and the hand has gone to showdown, opponents are going to notice that you are always betting a hand not a draw.

Now, the next time you hold a drawing hand in this situation, you make the semi-bluff, expecting to be believed. In other words, you play off whatever your image is at a given time in a calculated fashion. If you merely semi-bluff randomly you’ll get a random response and your expectation will take a random walk around the number zero.

Of course good players may read you for someone who likes to play off your image in that way. For those players you have a slightly different image; an image behind the image if you like. But you can still play off it by semi-bluffing slightly later, or earlier, than you believe they would expect you to. These decisions are obviously rather delicate and opponents who understand that you will try to play off the back of your image are much less easy to fool.

INCREASING EXPECTATION

As long as you are playing against your image you should make money, because opponents are more likely to make a mistake against you. The catch here is that in order to acquire an image to play off, you must remain predictable while generating it. It’s this fear of making a play that conforms to opponents’ expectations that drives people into acting randomly.

It’s a justifiable fear of course, but it goes deeper than the actual financial cost to you on a given hand. It goes right down to the basic power struggle in a poker game of who is controlling whom. This is often an emotional response rather than a rational one. This is what drives some people to never stand still and never allow opponents to get a handle on their play.

The first thing to note here is that if your opponents have no idea what you are doing then you have no idea how they are going to react. Randomness begets randomness, so everyone just gets murdered by the rake. Second, it’s inevitable that opponents will be able to make some inferences about your hand. They will expect you to play a narrower range under the gun than on the button, and to play A-A more often than 9-4 offsuit. That much is unavoidable.

If you play away from orthodoxy a little then what you lose in terms of the power of your situation you may gain from the power of surprise. But there are serious limits to the viability of deviating from basic sound cardplay. Fair enough, you don’t want your opponent to know your game inside out. But if the handle he’s got is that you play sane poker then that still gives you plenty of room within which to work.

MONEY DOWN THE DRAIN

However, even a little mixing up of a sound game may cost you unnecessary money. If you’re worried about being predictable, a strange play may appear like a win-win proposition: either it wins you the pot or it convinces opponents that you cannot, after all, be read with any reliability so they shouldn’t bother trying. But an advertising campaign is often not necessary once you look at it through the eyes of your foes.

Even if you don’t vary your style at all the natural variance in the cards and flops you are dealt is going to make it look like you do. For example you may decide that even if you have a hopeless hand you should still try to steal around half the time it’s folded to you on the button. That’s your basic style for the game at hand. But if you happen to hold a good hand the first five times it’s folded to you, you’ll bet every time and your opponents will peg you as a much more larcenous player than you are.

Knowing this is your image, you can then temporarily reduce your stealing frequency, perhaps to zero for the time being, knowing you’ll get paid off if you catch another big hand. Remember that opponents can only see your actions, not your cards, so they are getting a very fuzzy picture of your true style and you will be much less transparent than you may fear.

Another way in which your play appears naturally ‘mixed up’ is when you are doing different things for different people. For example, there may be a calling station at your table and you’ve taken his money repeatedly by always showing a hand not a bluff. You worry that unless you let him ‘catch you at it’ every now and then you’ll lose a long-term source of revenue.

But calling stations will look for all sorts of reasons to call. If you’ve recently run a bluff against some other player at the table and it’s gone wrong, then as far as the calling station is concerned your image is back to being a bluffer. He doesn’t understand that you’d never try the play against him.

SUMMARY

Overall, it’s only if you have been getting your cards in a completely even fashion that your style is in danger of being revealed. Only then should you change the frequency with which you make various plays. Don’t do it randomly though. You should play contrary to your image in a way that you think will make money and only against players who are aware of your image in the first place. But cards so rarely come out in nice regular ways that usually no ‘mixing it up’ is needed at all.