My latest poker strategy article, The Worst Seat at the Table Should Be the One On Your Right, is now appearing in 2+2 Magazine. It’s about how, simply by playing well and applying pressure with the right kinds of hands in the right situations, you should end up making life difficult for the player on your right in a deep-stacked no-limit game:
Sowing these seeds of doubt and conveying the impression that you could have anything is an important part of making your opponents uncomfortable, and it’s most important vis-à-vis the player on your right. You don’t have to be combative, but resist the temptation to do the nice thing and tell them what you had. Even lying is less helpful for this purpose than saying nothing at all. Let the doubt eat away at them.
Excellent point. I rarely show my cards no matter what. I won a pot with a rivered straight flush at Harrah’s in Las Vegas once and was soooo tempted to show. However, I wanted that seed of doubt to grow wild!
Inspired now to show less or not at all.
Because I play pretty tight at live cash, I’d thought that occasionally showing strong hands (or maybe telling them after a fold the truth or something close to it) assists with believability around my bluffs or semi-bluffs because everything reinforces an image of strength?
But this idea of building frustration and sowing seeds of doubt that are never resolved seems like a good idea worth experimenting with.
If you’re deliberately playing tight, then you shouldn’t be trying to convince your opponents that you’re playing tight. That’s just encouraging them to play correctly against you. Yes, it helps you bluff more effectively, but presumably you aren’t doing a lot of that, and it also helps them fold more effectively to your value bets, which you are presumably doing a lot more often.
Thank you for the article. I would add that relative position to the PFR can be just as +EV. Bread and butter situation #538: when there is a loose-bad player on my left, and I can close the action after seeing how the table reacts to his raise.