When playing in online poker tournaments, you’re eventually going to have to start mixing up your play so as to trap your opponents and capture their stack. Ideally you will make a few cheap plays that will leave your opponents thinking you are a weak player.

Forethought should always be taken however, because your adversaries in the early stages of online poker tournaments are willing to risk far more than you would expect.However, once you hit the middle stages and your opponents skill level becomes more obvious, blending up your hole cards and betting activity can pay huge dividends when the opportunity shows itself.

Your goal here is create muddiness in your opponents and that may take some experience to do correctly and inexpensively. You might not be as good at making reads, and are further obstructed by not being able to look an opponent in the face while playing online.

Pot control is the key here as you want to mix it up, but not make it costly to do so. This is often difficult because many new players suffer from a lack of emotional control at the table and that gets them into trying and often times costly situations.

This is often the largest hump to get over when improving your poker game, but you must do it so as to avoid being too easily decipherable by acute opponents. For long term winning in poker tournaments, a lack of control will cost you money.

This is a strategy I often use when starting a poker tournament. Take two or three hands at the beginning of the tournament and whenever you get them dealt to you, raise the pot. You can’t always do it, but if you are first in the pot then make believe it is better than it really is and play it that way.

Keep those hands in mind throughout the tournament, and the randomness of them being dealt to you will mix your play up sufficiently. The added bonus here is that if your opponents are using poker software to track your style of play they are getting misinformation.