In-game Poker Image
An aspect of poker that has nothing to do with rules or tactics is that of projecting an image at the table. It is all about the impression that players give while indulging in the game. Your image consists of all you know about your opponents and all they know about you. It includes more than perception and bluffing. There may be some decisions surrounding it that seem odd or even erroneous.
Everything you do or not do at the table creates an image which your opponents then try to analyze. It is possible to either minimize or increase your image. Some players try to be as unobtrusive as possible. But each player still has to play his hands and the other alternative is to create a show of activity, of a vivid style of game which is disorienting because unpredictable or indecipherable.
Bluffing is usually a means to increase the bank in the course of a few more bets. By creating an image, we sacrifice a fraction of current potential benefits for the sake of far greater far-future benefits, benefits which may last the entire game and more than one game. We make a few weak moves in a specific situation. For this round, we may have lost something, but in similar future situations, when we again have a strong hand and can play well, competent but credulous opponents will tend to believe that you have the weaker hand, while more perceptive players will simply not know how to read you. A single false slip of this kind can establish long term effects and significantly increase the value of our strong hands.
Chess players employ image-based strategy quite a lot. Whether the player\’s strength is known to you or not he may make credible bad moves or even strange or stupid ones. He will sacrifice pieces, fail to protect his position, or to take positions. His opponent will be disoriented by his lousy play. The image-based player will then make a subtle sweep of valuable pieces or attack a weak point that no one even thought to be his focus.
The heart of the strategy is the same in both poker and chess: current advantage is sacrificed so greater advantage is yours down the road. Every hand in this particular strategy is not played at its best as you imagine less tangible but greater future potential. At present you seem to be a weak opponent, but you recover later and it is the image you have projected that will allow you a strong recovery and leave your opponents wondering what in the world happened.
As you learn to create an array of effective images, you will learn to choose which \”bad\” moves to fake in order to best achieve which goal. You may want your opponents to be disoriented only in relation to a specific set of your skills. You may want them to believe that you are weak, or to be uncertain about whether you are or aren\’t, or to think that you are always bluffing before a bet.
Better to get your image going early in the game when the bank is small, else several \’bad\” moves in a row when the bank is large may result in more losses than any offsetting wins can overcome.

