Deception
Mike Caro once said the “Essential soul of poker is deception.” And he couldn’t be more right. But let me clarify, deception goes further than simply playing your weak hands strong and bluffing them, and playing your strong hands weak and then reaping the rewards from the mistakes of your opponents you’ve deceived.
No it goes much further than that. That’s basic level deception, and should be employed by any online poker player who has an elementary grasp of the game. More to the point, this type of deception can be easily be picked up by observant players.
So in order to keep your deceptive tactics up, and keep a ruse around your actions thus keeping your opponents guessing throughout the game, you have to learn adaptation, and more specifically adaptive deception.
If you see that an opponent responds to verbal cues, then use those verbal cues to your advantage when in a hand with him. The same principle goes for any other type of cues that people pick up on. Say someone puts more emphasis on body language, then you should be employing deceptive body language.
When you add this to your betting strategy, you create multiple levels of deception, and thus make it harder for your online poker opponents to get a good read on you.
