Repping a hand

I've heard the more thinking type players mentioning spots where they think betting is over-repping their hand, so I gave the idea a bit of thought. Basically, no matter what type of player we are, or how unlikely our opponents are to understand, our actions on a certain board rep a hand. You bet a AKT board, you are repping something like AA/KK/TT/AK/QJ. Now because of table image, opponents, action so far etc, we may have this, we may not. But overall, we are trying to confuse our opponents more often than not, so we under-rep or over-rep quite a bit.

The over-rep is the most common play in poker, more commonly known as the bluff or sometimes semi-bluff. Since we rarely flop a monster hand, you have people betting an AKT board with 66 because they think they'll get folds from a lot of hands. We have a horrible hand on that board, but if a bet will win the pot a lot, go for it. So generally, an over-rep is to fold other hands. Under-repping is more likely when we have AA there or QJ. Why bet a guy with A5 off that board, when we might get two streets off him later? When under-repping, we are mainly trying to not lose our opponents so we can make more money on them later.

The difficulty comes when your hand can't easily be represented. You have QQ on a board of K94r. Now it still looks pretty good, but it's really 2rd pair. So you are first to act after the flop, and bet. If he calls or raises, he is repping a much stronger hand than you hold, so you have gotten yourself into trouble. You have over-repped your hand, and are certainly getting folds now by weaker hands only, and very few calls by anything you beat. If you check, you have slightly under-repped your hand, and if he bets, you don't know whether he's doing it with top pair or better, or as a pure bluff with 76s. In position, it especially becomes better play to under-rep a hand, because we can extract more value easily, and still get an idea if he is very strong by the river, like if we check behind on that flop and he bets 2 streets strong.

The main idea behind thinking about representation, is to look at the game from another view, and think about what everyone is repping when they bet, check or fold and then think about whether you believe them or not based on history, your image, etc.