Stragedy for Garbage Hands

I read an interesting article by Daniel Negreanu about playing garbage hands that I thought I should share with you. The article tries to give you a better understanding of the theory of playing garbage hands occasionally.

The basic principle on this is based on two things. You're representing a strong hand by bluffing and you're hoping your opponent don't have much of a hand. The article gives an example to further explain this:

"Let's say, for example, that you're playing seven-card stud in an eight-man game and the first four players all fold to you. Your up card is an ace. Unfortunately for you, your hole cards are absolute trash (2-7).

This isn't a hand you would play under any normal circumstances, but suppose the three remaining players are all pretty tight. On top of that, their cards don't look threatening; player A shows a 2, player B has a 3, and player C also shows a deuce.

What should you do? Raise!"

In this example given, you can represent strength with a raise. Your opponents appear weak, and they don't know you have garbage in the hole so chances are you'll win the hand.

If they don't fold preflop, you can still win the hand.

If an Ace comes on the flop and the conservative player doesn't have the ace, he'll probably check to you. You should bet on the flop if he does check. If your opponent calls the bet, or, worse, raises, then you should fold. The majority of the time, he'll fold if he doesn't have the pair of aces.

That's not the only way to win a hand. You could hit something on the flop with your garbage hand.

Now, you should try this very often but, as the atricle points out, "if you want to reach the next level of poker thinking, it's something you'll eventually have to try."
There are three steps that poker players go through as their reshaping their play. Each step they ask themselves a question.

First Step: "What do I have?"

Next Step: "What does my opponent have?"

Third Step: "What does my opponent think I have?"

What do you think?

Granted, in stud these types of bluffs area little easier just by being able to judge the exposed cards, outs of theirs that you may have buried, and outs that are cancelled out by other players. Along the thought line of catching something as you play this bluff, the same holds true for your outs that you don't see exposed ( and therefore have a better chance of catching). Gus Hanson (like him or hate him) will often play and force marginal hands along similar thought lines in hold-em. You can catch him evaluating the other players deciding to play, and if he feels that a lot of top cards are conflicting, unless he's convinced that a monster is in the pot he'll play just about anything sometimes, and often catches that 7 or 9 to give him the winner. But I wholeheartedly agree that these should only be tried in a very limited sense. (I wish some of the stud players that I come up against would take that advice and quit chasing-I'm getting tired of them catching on the last down card)