grenv: Like HRQLS said.... it is not stupid, as you contend, to sometimes lose on purpose to help you win more later.

In my poker example, I may stay in a hand with a low pair of 9s, knowing it is not the best hand, but the winner will see that I played with only 9s and might see a tendancy for me to play low hands. Now when I have a pair of aces, and my opponent has a pair of queens or kings, I might get him to play thinking that he may have me beat because I am known to play with a low hand sometimes.

Part of ponds games has evolved on this site to be about reading tendancies from opponents whom you play against regularly etc. Each game here is not an individual game unto itself. What I do in this game will have a bearing on how others may play in another game against me.

You may play the logical way everytime. This is a tendancy people know about you, and wil dictate how someone will play in an end game against you. If you were playing poker, you would be called a "rock". Rocks only play solid hands all the time. That is a good stategy to not ever lose too much money, but when people know you only play good hands they will fold everytime you play and your strategy will rarely win you very much money either. (like you said, in poker, its not about how many hands you win, rather how much money you win) You can win 10 of 11 hands for a net profit of 10$ each hand, and I can win the 11th hand for a net profit of 500$ because when I stayed in so did everyone else because they thought I will play with a poor hand, and when you played everyone folded, so you won very little money.

Its obviously not quite the same for ponds, but the idea is stil there. We play against the same people over and over, and learn tendancies that help us determine how to play. Sopme of us think it is a good long term strategy to play "inconsitant with logic" sometimes, to have a better chance in a tough situation later on.