the benefit of confusion

I do not think enough analytical attention has been paid to the value of confusion. Now I just play 10/20 throught 30/60 because I live in Alaska and we have no games up here, so I can't play enough to be able to compete at the higher levels, only being able to play a few times a year. But I do pretty well when I do get to play. And I am an old low ball player, so I do have a very old intense game - now lost to antiquity - lol.


Anyway, when I do play, the first thing I look for in the game (after I have taken a read on the players), is that I look for an opportunity to creat confusion.


E.G.: When my daughter graduated from Berkeley a few years back I took her and her boy friend to Las Vegas, and her 13 year old sister.


Well, in Alaska we have been playing a five card Omaha game we call cincinattee, so I knew a bit about how to play Omaha. The hold em game looked real tight.


So I sat down to a 6/12 with a kill game. Right off the bat I could see the daily players were taking turns trying to turn the nut in low and sort of taking it easy on each other so they could all look at the flops cheap and scratch out a few hundred dollars a day from the tourists (of which I was one - lol)


I decided I had to do something about this, so I waited until I had some good hands and then I came out firing with both guns. And I never stopped. And I played my high hands real aggresively. I had people throwing their cards across the table (one time I won the pot with nothing because the guy threw a good hand away before I even had a chance to play. A guy sitting next to me who looked pretty rough growled "you don't have to raise everytime" and I thought to myself, "yes I do" - lol.


I was the big winner every night (nice to show off to my kids) and either I was real lucky or I had confused the game so much that they just could not figure out what to doing and were having trouble with the speed? Remember they had been playing a very slow sort of rote system that produced a very reliable daily wage = though quite small, but rliable - lol.