Here is another excerpt from the book draft. There is no guarantee that this will appear in the book in any form. The concept is important to me, and describes the balance we need to achieve to beat middle limit games.

I want to take a moment and explain FUD. FUD is a term that was developed by a guy who used to run IBM in the 60s when a number of competitors to IBM were coming up with rival computers. In general, every rival computer that came out to compete with IBM was better than an IBM computer, because it had to be better. Who in the world would try to make a computer that is worse than IBM to compete with IBM?

IBM’s marketing strategy to hold down all those competitors with better machines was called FUD, which stood for fear, uncertainty, and doubt. The idea was to convince the market and individual buyers and particularly corporate officers that if you buy a non-IBM machine, who knows what might happen. Maybe it will get bad service. Maybe it won’t be good. If you go with IBM, you know you are getting a great machine, great service, great parts, and great support. If you go with anybody else, who knows what might happen. We used to have an old slogan that said, “Nobody ever got fired for buying an IBM computer.”

A poker player’s best friend is FUD. In order to be a top poker player, you must have the same attitude: that you want to spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt amongst your opponents. You want them to be afraid of you. You want them to not understand you. You want them to never know exactly where you are. Opponents who are afraid, confused, and disoriented tend to become predictable. Theycan’t make a move against you because they don’t know where you are, so they tend to do things like check and call, only bet when they have real hands, and bluff less. That’s what you want. You want to have predictable opponents.

Rocks inspire fear, but they don’t inspire uncertainty and doubt. When a rock raises, opponents think, “Oh. I better avoid him. I’m not going to play my QT offsuit against this guy. I will fold my K9 suited in the blind. I will make a big sacrifice.” They have the fear factor, but they don’t have any uncertainty or doubt because people are very comfortable that they know what the rock is playing.

Loose-aggressive players, or even just loose players, inspire uncertainty and doubt. They[play a lot of hands, so people don’t know exactly where they are at, but they they are not inspiring fear. People don’t get nervous because a loose-aggressive player plays, or even raises, or a loose player plays, because it’s just part of the overall flow of the game that he’s going to play a lot of hands and he’s going to play or raise with AK and A5 and KQ and J9 suited, so nobody is fearing his raises or plays. Nobody thinks, “Oh, my God, he’s in the game! I don’t want to play.”

What we want to do is achieve a balance between fear and uncertainty and doubt. We want to be tight enough to inspire fear, but we want to be varied enough that there is a certain amount of uncertainty and doubt in the minds of the opponents, which will in turn do two things. One, it will help make them more predictable, because opponents that are uncertain tend to be more predictable. Two, it gets our big hands, which we hold most of the time, paid off.

What we want to do is create enough action that there is at least a modicum, if not more, uncertainty and doubt in the minds of the opponents as to whether we really have a hand this time. At the same time, we almost always want to have a real hand. We don’t want to act like an idiot, so we don’t want to create uncertainty in that way.