Combat by Proxy in Poker

Every time that you sit down at the poker table, you are suiting up for battle. Poker is a war that is fought on the felt where your chips are your soldiers and you are the general that makes all of the decisions. As any good general will know, there are times when you have to use one enemy against another in order to get the outcome that you want and the same is true when playing poker. Having the ability to play your opponents off one another is a difficult maneuver but one that can pay off quite handsomely when accomplished. Playing your opponents off one another is as much an art as it is a science. In order to be able to accomplish such a feat, one must have the skill, patience, experience, and a little bit of luck.

The first step to being able to play your opponents off one another is being able to read your opponents. If you are not able to interpret what they are doing and the cards that they are holding in their hands, chances are you will not be able to leverage that information to make them do what you want them to do. Your ability to read your opponents and the quality of your reading will have a direct relationship with how well you can make them do your dirty work for you.

In addition to being able to read your opponents, you need to be able to understand their psychological profile. Poker, especially at the higher skill levels, is more a game of the mind than it is a game of cards. Each player has certain things that they will respond to and buttons that can be pushed. Knowing what buttons to push and how to push them is a key component of being able to get your opponent to do what you want them to do. Over the course of play, try to push the buttons of your opponents to get a feel for what they are, how they react to certain actions, and determine whether you can use this information against them.
Playing a mind game with more than one opponent and getting them to do something specific requires a great deal of maneuvering and specific situations that can be acted upon. Not every situation is ripe for treachery but for those that are, nothing else will do the job quite like it. Because these situations do not come along very often, patience needs to be exercised in order to wait for the right moment.

Methods that work to make an opponent take out another opponent will vary depending on the situation and the player. At times, an off-hand comment is enough to get an opponent to make a raise which prices out another competitor. At other times, perhaps a small bet is all that is required to get an opponent to push all-in against a stronger hand. Because your opponents are not machines, manipulation may not always achieve the desired result. As with all elements of poker, luck can and will have an effect on whether or not you can get one bird to kill another with your stone.

Posted by Joel on Jul 26 2010. Filed under Poker Strategy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry