While playing 1-3-5 pot-limit Omaha the other day I ran into one hell of an odd situation. Or maybe I should say one hell of an odd situation ran into me. Either way, it started with me sitting middle-blind holding J-J-4-A with the Ace of Spades dry. Six players limped in for $5, and I followed like a two-legged dog.

Well, so the flop came J-10-4 with two spades. I checked under the gun, and the next player bet the pot ($30) from the middle position. A bunch of us called, and the last caller—to my immediate left—shoved for $65. Naturally everyone called the min raise, so it was back to me—last to act, holding the nuts with one player all-in.

What should I have done? With $300 in the center at that point it was a no-brainer, on-the-spot pot raise for my highly vulnerable “nut” hand. But before I get into how I actually ended up, I guess I’d better explain why that’s exactly what I didn’t do.

You see, a pot raise would have revealed my hand and almost surely left me playing heads-up with Mr. All-In; the big stacks with the potential two-pair and small sets would have fled faster than a couple of French marines. Even more importantly, though, I had that dry Ace of Spades in hand, and if the flush came it was going to be checked around. So, basically, if I drove everyone else out I’d be going it alone against Mr. All-In’s flush and/or straight draw. My only chance, I figured, was to take a shot at the bigger stacks with a hidden hand.

That’s why—against all standards of play—I limped in a second time with the trip-jack nuts. I told myself that if the board paired nobody could put me on the hand, and if it didn’t, I was going to lose anyway. My “dry ace buy” was canceled by the all-in in the main pot and by the fact that, if I raised and a spade came, every player who made a flush would be committed in a side pot.

If you think it’s a mouthful to read it was even worse to have that thought zipping around my head. All I could do, really, was wait and see what developed. But, then, I was valuing deception and convoluted thinking over conventional wisdom at that point.

As it turned out, it was indeed a no-brainer—a “near-100-percent-of-the-time pot re-raise on the flop” situation. The King of Spades came on the turn, and the wrap and the flush got there. It was checked around as it almost had to be, back to my dry Ace of Spades, and wouldn’t you know, the river came a blank; my trip jacks won the pot, forcing me to show how I’d played anyhow. And that’s when the frilly invites and offers for rides home if I’d stay a while longer started.

Yessir, it was a doozie. Hell, I was half tempted to gloat—and this was hours after my little scheme had gone off, mind you—“Yeah, it was an unusual play with the dry ace and top set, wasn’t it? What did you think I had?” Instead, though, I decided to yuck it up for one particular Good Samaritan with what must have been an exceptionally large gas budget.

“I’m 100 miles from home,” I said.

“Where do you live?” came the response with cloying mock sincerity.

“You know where Calumet Farm is?” I replied, trying to sound as juicy as possible.

So it turns out my lunatic gambit had in fact paid off. In addition to hedging me against the flush draw, it had had a kind of advertising value: I was new in the game—nobody knew me very well—so everyone thought I was clueless and reluctant to commit my chips to a pot.

All justifications aside, though, it probably comes down to a difference in poker styles. Some people like the nice, safe, rote percentage play. I, on the other have, value deception. Sure, it’s gone south for me plenty of times before, but it’s not always a bad way to go. You just have to realize that, even when the situation seems to scream that there’s only one reasonable option, that doesn’t mean there isn’t an unreasonable play that might work better.

And that brings us to the moral of this week’s column, sports fans: More valuable than anything else in poker—at least sometimes—is the idea of misrepresenting yourself. It can be overdone, of course. And perhaps I overdid it during the hand in question. But when the deck’s cooperating it can come off finer than 100 Louvres worth of art.

It’s what I call “poker trickeration.” Much like football’s triple-reverse flea-flicker home run bomb on fourth and short, it’s any non-standard, high risk, low-percentage play that pays off big-time if it hits. It’s just the thing to keep your skilled opponents guessing and give the true poker trickster enough elbow room to grab a major pot.

And that’s perhaps more important than the risk of getting another top set outdrawn in Omaha. After all, if you can just encourage a little misread from time to time, you might end up sitting behind one helluva huge stack.

By: Dave Cinch
dave.cinch@acehoyle.com

To avoid legal redress under international copyright law reprinters must cite the name of the above article's author and that author's e-mail address, and they must link to its publishing site: www.acehoyle.com.