Marcus Bateman / Marcus Bateman / 22 September 2008 / Leave a comment

Advertising is an extremely important part of any poker players game at the mid stakes or higher (at the low stakes it is useless as mostly the players are too weak to notice it, and/or respond to it).

It is especially important for tight players, as the fact that they are playing very few hands indicates that they are usually strong, which makes getting paid off on your big hands much harder. Because of this, it is often wise to play the occasional junk hand in an aggressive manner if you are a very tight player - simply for the sake of showing a bad hand that you have bluffed with/shown down.

If you are a looser player, then your playing style has it's own built in advertising - you simply cannot always have the hand because you are playing so many. Here, a sort of reverse advertising becomes useful, where it is worth trying to show down your monsters, even at the expense of winning a few extra bets. If the table has seen you showdown some big hands, they will start to respect your raises too much and your loose style will pick up many more pots than it otherwise might have. Here we can clearly see that giving up a few extra bets earlier can win many more later.

The greatest use of advertising is that it can be a great way to initiate changing gears. Say you have been playing quite tight and you win a big pot with a big pair. This is often a great time to start raising a lot of hands, as your opponents will be worried about the fact that they saw you have the goods. After a while, they will start to notice that you are rasing lots of hands, and may very well call you down and see that you have been raising junk. Obviously after this you quickly return to the tight style, and let your opponents new found curiosity pay the dividends on your big hands.

Just like with advertising in the real world, the human brain only needs a surprisingly small push to start thinking about something in a certain way. You really only need to throw in the occasional bit of strange play to quickly convince opponents that you play in a ceratin way. By thinking about not only how your opponents are playing, but also how they think you are, you can utilise advertising to really push up your profits.