Advertising your Plays in Texas Hold’em
There are lots of questions in poker that bring different answers depending upon who you ask. One of those is the question of whether you should advertise your plays. When you play poker games and you win a big hand on a bluff, there’s always that desire to show your opponent that you just dominated his soul. But should you do this? As you learn poker and learn more about the game’s little ins and outs, you will know a little bit more about how to advertise your plays effectively. For now, let’s dive into the issue.
Whether it is a poker tournament or you are playing a typical ring game, advertising your plays after the fact is never a really good idea. One of the principles that you will learn as you get past the free poker stuff is that information is a really important factor to success in this game. Players will call sometimes just for the sake of seeing what another player is holding. For advanced players, the entire idea behind a hand is to identify your opponent’s range of hands, based upon his betting patterns, history, reputation, and everything else at your disposal. Sometimes it can be a really big guessing game.
So that brings us to the question of why you would want to give your opponents information? If you make a really nice bluff and take down a pot, why let your opponent know that you’re capable of such a play. If you make everyone fold with your pocket aces, why give them an idea of how you play premium poker pairs? If they’re left guessing, then they will have less information to go on the next time they need to make a decision in a hand against you.
The only time that it’s alright to make this sort of move is if you are doing it with a distinct purpose. Maybe you are early in a tournament and a bunch of players fold to your bet. If you want to show them that you’re the type of play who makes moves with solid cards, you might show them your top pair. Likewise, you could use a well timed exposure of a bluff to make your opponents think that you’re willing to push them around with any two cards. But be careful when you do this, because you won’t be able to pull off that bluff again without someone calling you down. In this way, it limits your options, and that’s why most people who play poker would advise you not to advertise your plays at all