The poker game that relies on creating an image is in another dimension than rule or tactic based poker, although all of these are essential to a good game. Image concerns everyone at the table and is the total of all you know about your opponents and all you let them know about you. Image making will sometimes cause you to make moves which your opponents perceive as odd or ill conceived.
Your opponents are attempting to analyze your every move or lack thereof. There are times when it is best to hide your image and times when it should be on display. Some will play with an image that obscures their thinking and actions and some will create a major display of activity with much vivacity and fanfare which can completely disorient and befuddle opponents.
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 is known for its image based strategies. The players whose strengths are either well known or unknown make credible bad moves or what appear to be oddly ridiculous moves. They will sacrifice pieces, fail to defend their positions or to take positions. This is disorientation by deliberately making bad moves. This player will then use his bad strategy to make a quick swoop or attack a weak point that was previously not in his line of focus.
The main idea is the same in both games: you sacrifice current advantage in order to seize greater advantage later in the game. Instead of playing every concrete hand the best way, you envision less palpable but likely future possibilities. The move seems for the present to have put you at a disadvantage, but the game allows you to recover later and when you are ready to recover with a vengeance, your image will be your primary means.
You need to learn to project a variety of images and use the image that best befits a given situation. You will also learn which dumb moves to use to fake out your opponents to best achieve whichever goal you have in mind. You may want to use your image to disorient only with regard to a particular skill set. There will be times when you want them to see you as a weak player, or at least wonder if you are or not, or to think you are just a big bluff artist.
It is probably better to generate the image at the outset of the game, when the bank is still small. Otherwise, a few consecutive bad moves with a big bank may cost more than the eventual win.
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