[Smurph64]

slowplaying, tricky playing, fps are all fun and make you feel awesome when you suck someone in with it.

They make you feel superior and its just sweet to ding someone for that extra bet.

Its ok once in awhile to do this especially if you are aware of the betting lines of your opponents.

But the contrary is also true, if I look at my database I have a ton of guys who are tricky players that I have tagged as such.

If I have played more than 20 hands with them I am ahead of 90% of them.

Now that isn't mathematical proof but what it's saying is its easy to take the extra bet out of the person in this hand and look at it as an isolated incident, but if one were to look at the combined efforts of a player who plays value driven poker versus those trying to steal extra bets, I will wager the value driven poker player will be farther ahead than the trickster.

The cost of being tricky is expensive. Even bad players play better against you for one because they don't like being shown up.


For that one reason alone its not worth being tricky.


Hand by hand, the evidence is such that you can't look at any math to prove or disprove the expectations being better in one circumstance vs another.

There are way too many variables to even begin to isolate a problem mathematically where a comparison can be made. But overall those that play value driven poker can show better numbers over a large number of hands than a player who plays primarily to win big pots by being tricky.