Is there really any value to "mixing up your play" in these games?

[jdl22]

It seems like there are tons of posts here every day where somebody says "I did X in order to mix up my play" or something very similar. Usually X involves either looser than normal play (calling raises with hands usually not worth it, limping with something normally mucked) or doing something tricky/slowplaying big pocket pairs or possibly big slick (trying to limp reraise where you wouldn't normally, calling raises in place of reraise etc).

I have done similar moves in my games with similar thinking and gotten burned by it pretty much every single time. When I say burned it's not necesarily catastrophic, I mean that at best I left an obvious big bet or two on the table and at worst I lost a pot when maybe someone would have folded to my raise.

After giving it some thought I think it is best simply to play your hand optimally every time in these games. The benefit of deception both in the hand and for future hands is far outweighed by the costs. As has been pointed out in virtually every poker book, there is no reason to try anything fancy against fish so there is little gained there. As for the better players many of them multitable anyway so they tend to just play abc poker which by definition means not really playing the opponent much. So there is no real benefit to be gained from these people either. It would seem that the only place it could work would be against the dedicated single tablers but the lost bets the fish don't put in more than make up for that.

Any thoughts?