Counteracting opponent's edge

[bridgey321]

Say you are playing in a tournament and have a really good player to your left, who you have established is not only better than yourself but he has position on you. If you are to play normally against this opponent you are bound to lose money as he has a significant edge.

A way to avoid him reading you (betting pattern tells) there is a technique to make your actions randomised and therefore elimate this edge:

Lets say you raise from middle position and he flats in position, rest of the table folds, and you are heads up to the flop. In this situation you can decide to randomise your next action. For example, you may decide to only make a continuation bet when there are more black cards than red cards on the flop and check when there are more red cards than black cards on any flop. By randomising this action you take away your opponents ability to pick up any tells on your betting patterns.

Obviously this is only applicable when you feel your are at a dissadvantage vs a very good player and should not really be used all the time and against weak(er) opponents as your randomised actions may not be optimum in the situation.

Thoughts?

[tan_man25]

When I have a player to my left who has position on me, I tend not to try and outplay them. I just play my hands against them and try not to make any overly complex moves against them.

The technique does seem like it could take away reading ability though. It is an interesting one. +1 for the post.

[SirJonnyP]

i believe someone, possibly little or browen, talked about using this technique when playing someone who is sing game theory or something like that???

[aamir6433]

Interesting. You'd have to be in a sitch of reallllly no hope - like 3 handed vs Dwan and Negreanu or something! If they're going to beat you anyway why not? I'm sure it'd be pretty confusing to play against! Dunno whether it'd work well but i might try it at my next home game lol

[Pates]

Good way of using randomness. However (although seriously unlikely) they might actually pick up on something like this. Maybe just use the milliseconds on your watch 0-49 c-bet 50-100 don't c-bet. Very interesting idea though, I have heard that the best poker players are the players that play more randomly.