The following is another excerpt from the working draft of my book. There is no guarantee that this will show up in the book, or that it will be recognizable if it does. I am writing a good deal of material, and some of it may hit the cutting room floor. Please also remember that this excerpt is surrounded by much more detailed information on how to recognize, execute, and get away from situations such as I describe. Please do not think you have learned the material from this tiny piece. OK, enough disclaimer. Here is the excerpt:

The vast majority of winning players wait for hands that have positive expectation, then put in many bets. This is the essence of the selective-aggressive philosophy that has been proven over the years to be a winning one.

I agree with it, and have profited significantly doing exactly that against players who lose patience, take the worst of it, gamble to excess, or simply cannot separate +EV hands from minus ones.

If you play a selective-aggressive style and have patience, you can beat most games because they contain enough bad players. Waiting to have the best of it against poor players who can’t get away from hands is the bedrock method of making money at limit hold’em.

Bluffing. Let’s go off on a tangent for a moment and talk about bluffing. You understand that bluffing is an essential part of the game. If you never bluff you become predictable, and your smarter opponents will simply stop paying you off. However, if you play opponents who will pay you off whether you bluff or not, you should not bluff.

Eventually, most opponents will realize that you never bluff, and you will find it hard to get action on your winning hands. You can stop there and just live with the decreased profit, partially because bluffing can cost you money when you try and fail. If you do, you sacrifice the significant profit that comes from winning pots when your bluff is successful, AND you are giving up the extra calls you would get once your opponents realize that your bet might be a bluff.

If you realize this, you will bluff at pots at least occasionally, not to show that you can bluff, but because in the long run, a proper bluffing strategy (or even a less proper but occasional bluffing strategy) will be +EV.

When you bluff, your hand at that moment is not +EV. Your play is. You hope to win the pot by betting, but even if you don’t win this pot, your opponent will now doubt you when you have the goods. You may have started with a +EV hand, but by the time the river comes around, you can’t win except by bluffing. And you realize that there is a good chance you won’t win (if you bluff into a 10 bet pot, you need only win one time in 10 to be profitable).

Now you understand the fact that you can at times be betting with the worst hand in an attempt to win the pot and sometimes you will win it. If you don’t, you lose extra money right now, but will probably make it back in the long run because of the doubt you have planted in your opponents’ minds.

Situational Play. What would happen if you extended that philosophy into other situations? In fact, what about looking for situations in which your actual hand is not as important as the fact that you may be able to win the pot by brute force, and if not, you may get action later?

You would now be making plays with hands that are not +EV (in fact, your specific hand may not even be relevant), but the situation is. These situations would require your putting in many more bets than a single bluff, and, if you fail, you would lose considerable money. You would need to be able to tolerate considerable swings. If you can’t even tolerate losing a single bet when you bluff, then this strategy is not for you.

Like bluffing, if you can make these plays work often enough to show a profit, or even a small loss, but increase your action on your better hands, then you gain from this approach.

There is no need to do this if your opponents are paying you off. And like bluffing, you need to do it sparingly, with the right opponent, and when you have the right image.

Time for an example. I was at the Rio during the World Series Of Poker killing a few hours. I jumped into a $20-$40 game that was just forming. After 10 minutes, it was clear the game was playing very tightly, as many game do when they start and many games do when tournament players switch to cash games. We were seven-handed, and I held Kd 3d on the button. The early players folded and a very tight gentleman limped from the cutoff. I did not think anyone limped from the cutoff anymore, but he did. Certainly that meant he did not have a premium hand or even anything close, so I raised. My objective was to create a situation where he would have to hit the flop or give me the pot containing 6.5 small bets, assuming the blinds folded.

This time the big blind did not fold, and the cutoff called. I flopped a king and bet out three times, the blind calling all the way and the cutoff folding on the flop. I won the showdown over the big blind’s pocket eights. If the big blind had a lesser hand, I would have won on the flop whether I hit my hand or not.

After the hand, the cutoff turned to me and told me he had Ac 6c. His point was that I was stupid raising with K-3 when he was smart enough to limp in with A-6. I’m sure many players feel that way, but I was happy with my actions, and the prospect of later profits if I should happen to raise pre-flop with a real hand.

I was reminded of something that I heard once in a bridge tournament, “The losers all go home complaining about the terrible play of the winners.”