Manipulating Opponents by Playing Poor Cards
When throwing poor hands into your playing style as an attempt to deceive other players into thinking you play weak hands as well as strong ones, the first thing to consider is definitely whether or not your opponents are good enough to catch on to what you are doing. If they are good enough to catch on, you may be able to lure them into calling or re-raising later on when you have a really good hand because they think you're once again raising with poor cards.
However, there is another extremely important aspect to this deception and manipulation technique. Raising with poor cards does absolutely no good if the other players never see the poor cards you are playing. No matter how good your opponents are at tracking playing styles, if they don't know you play poor cards they'll never think you play poor cards. This leaves numerous things to consider:
- If you win the hand and muck your hand they will never know you played with poor cards.
- If you lose the hand in a showdown and muck the hand they will never know you played with poor cards.
- If you fold while other players are still in the hand, you will have to muck the cards automatically and can never show the poor cards you played.
Now, one situation where you can definitely use this is when playing heads up. Almost anyone can catch on to your playing style when playing heads up and you're allowed to show any hand you want regardless of whether you win or lose. So manipulating a player heads up can be profitable in the long run, but still requires you playing against an opponent who actually cares about your table image. There are players who are bad enough that even if they know you mix in poor cards they will never treat you that way because they only consider the cards they have in their hand.
So playing poor cards not only relies on your opponents being good enough to catch on to your playing style, but also relies on having a chance to show the poor cards you are playing. Otherwise you are just throwing good chips away.