There are a lot of thoughts about poker in a beginner's head, and there's nothing wrong with that. I'm trying my best to correct some of the thoughts, since new players usually got many of them wrong. And it's only natural... live and learn. One of poker's key concepts, controlling your opponent is often understood wrong.
Some players tend to believe it's our goal to make our opponents confused.
If our opponent is indeed confused, well then we are kind of too... how can we possibly read our opponent correctly if he even himself doesn't know what to do? Obviously, it's better to have our opponent confused than actually knowing what they're doing, but it still doesn't help us as much as we'd like to. We want them to make unprofitable decisions (for them) and at the same time, profitable decisions (for us).
This is obviously a lot harder to do than what it sounds. Our hand range studies, hand reading abilities and poker theory studies among other stuff are built for this: to know what our opponents are going to do, and better yet, to make them do what we want them to.
My picture of controlling opponents as well as possible is to have a great understanding of how his/her mind works. Making curiousity calls and trapping bets just to see what kind of reactions there'll be. Looking at his stats (in case you've got a poker software like Poker Tracker or Poker Office). Basically, finding out every bit of information out there, coming up with a game plan based on the information and then executing the plan.
There's a "second level" to this stuff, too. Imagine a situation where there's a fish in your table, and another player who knows what he's doing - basically might break our fish before we get a chance to do it. First of all, you shouldn't "panic" here and make stupid, over-aggressive decisions just becaue the time is running out. You should concentrate on realistic chances. Some times the other player might get this fishes money, and there's nothing we can do about it. But when it's our time to make money, we'll have to be ready.
And to the actual point: sometimes you'll get into situation where you're going to have to "protect" the fish from other players. Still, you don't want to risk all you got just because of one fish. Ways of protecting bad players from losing their money to others is to make pots look the way he won't be excited to join. It depends on what kind of a player you're against, but for example if you know he likes to call raises from big blind (because of some weird fish theory like "I'll have to pay less to get in so this is definitely a spot for calling") but only if there are 3 or more players involved - try to make sure there are 2 in player in the pot.
Have all the fishes to yourself and don't let opponents to have them for theirselves.
You can control opponents by raising a lot pre-flop if they're tight (in this case, they usually "step their game up" and start playing more hands). Why is this good, for example? Because he's not comfortable with playing more hands than what he usually does, whereas you are hopefully very comfortable with the style. Maybe your opponent likes to check-raise strong hands on the river? OK, then just check behind when you suspect there's something weird going on. This might be his way of controlling you to check behind more and this is how he could get a couple of "free" showdowns.
Also, if you think there's awesome value in letting him check-raise you because you could probably get him in with a big hand later on, continue with him check-raising a few times (make sure you keep the amount of you put-in as small as possible). Then trap him.
Poker games as full of players who seek for control. Some do get it, while some never will. What I would call "The Ultimate Control" is when you know how your opponent reacts to every single thing you do. Having this kind of control is close to impossible in poker, but our goal should be to get as close to perfection as possible anyway.
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