Marcus Bateman / Marcus Bateman / 31 July 2008 / Leave a comment

No poker player will ever be successful long-term if they only play one set style of poker.

Although certain styles are extremely effective in certain situations, such as tight aggressive in low stakes cash games, or loose aggressive on the bubble of a tournament, to become a long term winner at high stakes requires the ability to 'change gears' and mix up how you play specific hands.

The most common form of changing gears is in the number of hands you are playing. If you start out playing tight at a table for an hour or so, only showing down strong hands and generally staying in line, players will start to respect your raises too much. As this situation develops, the correct strategy is to start raising your bluffing frequency, stealing as many pots as possible with your pseudo tight image. And just as you have changed from tight to loose as your raises start gaining respect, so you change straight back to tight, as your constant raises start to lose respect.

This strategy requires a constant grasp of how your opponents seem to be perceiving you. Each hand you play must be considered not only on its own merits, but also on the history of the previous hands played. Much like regular human history, feuds and factions seem to quickly develop between players at the poker tables - the anger over a bluff made twenty hands earlier, a sense of shame about a play gone wrong at the start of a session, or a verbal dispute between two players both believing they are in the right.

Often a small action like this can have huge consequences later on in the game. Perhaps the best example of this is showing a bluff or a monster hand at the table. It never ceases to amaze me how often players will continue to call down or fold to someone who has shown just one or two bluffs or big hands over a long session. It is also worth noting that Players' brains seem to put an extra special mental note on you if you show them a bluff (no doubt due to the greater psychological impact of being made to look stupid by someone). They will often quickly decide that you habitually bluff, which in turn clouds their judgement when deciding to call, with the inevitable consequence that curiosity kills the cat.

It is extremely hard to play against an observant player who is able to change gears at the right time and lay down a tricky table image. By constantly thinking about how the table is perceiving you as a player, you can become like a chameleon, with no fixed style for others to latch on to and start to read - with great consequences for your bankroll.