The Bluff Thread (1 Viewer)

[ekricket]

What makes a good bluff? What makes a bad bluff? I’ve been reading a book I picked up at a charity shop in Ireland (crazy, but they had about 10 poker books) called “The Book of Bluffs” by Matt Lessinger and it made me think that we didn’t have a thread dedicated to this very important strategy. The forward is by Mike Caro and the first thing he states is “Without bluffing there can be no poker”. Basically he explains that if all poker is is waiting for unbeatable cards to play then it would be a very boring long drawn out game without any discernible movement in bankrolls. You would have to wait for aces vs kings to ever have any action.

So in this thread let’s talk about what makes a bluff bad or good.
Lessinger has twelve bluffing proverbs, and perhaps the most interesting one to me is

“A good bluff should be misleading, but not confusing”

I’ve seen and experienced this many times, a raise preflop, check the flop, check the turn, then a massive River bet. That’s confusing to me, why would you have a hand good enough to raise, but then check two opportunities for value, then suddenly overbet the River? Independent of any cards in the board, this is a line that doesn’t make sense normally. And it’s a bet that normally someone calls because they are just confused and want information to clear up the confusion for later hand reference. Confusion often leads to calls.

For me, I often think about a poker hand as a conversation. If the conversation flows, it’s believable. But if it’s chaotic, it’s typically someone floundering and trying to tell a story that he doesn’t quite remember how it ends.

The conversations behind the actions have to make sense, and it has to be a line you can follow. I’ll post a few more replies and let’s see is this can take on some legs.

 

[ekricket]

You can’t be afraid of running a failed bluff.

There’s nothing wrong in running a failed bluff if you’ve done it properly. But there is a big thing wrong if you let a good bluffing opportunity pass by because you are afraid of being caught.
There is no way all your bluffs are going to hold up. But that shouldn’t keep you from making any.

 

[ekricket]

Chances are the flop won’t help. Won’t help you and won’t help your opponent.

If you’ve missed, and you suspect your opponent has too, don’t let him put you on the defensive. You should be the one putting them on the defensive. Now they have to defend a bluff instead of driving one.

 

[ekricket]

Control Yourself.

Don’t start talking. If you haven’t already misled you opponent, talking more will just confuse them. Confusion leads to calls.
Don’t do anything out if the ordinary. Don’t slam your chips when you normally slide them in
Don’t become a statue. If you shuffle chips all the time, keep shuffling them.

Curiosity kills bluffs. Don’t give opponents a reason to suddenly be curious about your actions.

 

[davislane]

Crazy bluff Matusow ran on Day 4 of the main event and the ensuing discussion.

https://www.pokernews.com/news/2022/07/mike-matusow-wsop-main-event-41622.htm

https://twitter.com/x/status/1546307892818563072

 

[jr8719]

You can’t be afraid of running a failed bluff.

This x 100. Create your story and commit to it on every street! In lots of cases, telling that story on the River with max pressure is the most important part: I'd rather commit to a bluff by firing that final bullet, than checking and giving up.

 

[HaRDHouSeiNC]

My whole life is BleFF

 

[ekricket]

Crazy bluff Matusow ran on Day 4 of the main event and the ensuing discussion.

https://www.pokernews.com/news/2022/07/mike-matusow-wsop-main-event-41622.htm

https://twitter.com/x/status/1546307892818563072

“On Twitter, the Poker Hall of Fame nominee explained that he was attempting to use his tight table image to his advantage when he made that aggressive play.”

When I read that the first thing that came to kind was “not everybody has the same image of your play as you think they do”
Just because you’ve folded for 136 hand in a row and think your projecting a tight image doesn’t mean the other players have even noticed that you’ve been folding. If they’ve been talking about the raiders game for the last 30 minutes, chances are they forgot you were even playing.

 

[Kentucky]

You can’t be afraid of running a failed bluff.

There’s nothing wrong in running a failed bluff if you’ve done it properly. But there is a big thing wrong if you let a good bluffing opportunity pass by because you are afraid of being caught.
There is no way all your bluffs are going to hold up. But that shouldn’t keep you from making any.

This is the part I struggle with - I always feel dumb for lighting money on fire when my bluffs get called, even though I know (in theory) I need some of my bluffs to fail in order to get my value bets paid off.

I keep reminding myself “Money is made when your holding is ambiguous.”

 

[trever]

Never try to bluff someone who is too stupid to fold

 

[ekricket]

Never try to bluff someone who is too stupid to fold

Maybe not stupid, but a person who won’t fold because:
They don’t recognize hand values or ranges - 1 level player
The stakes are too low - calling the bluff is meaningless because it’s just a few dollars
They are just stubborn and too proud to ever fall for a bluff

Actually the stakes are important. The higher the stakes, the more important bluffing skills become. If you can’t bluff successfully, you will never be successful at high stakes poker. Nobody will give you action when you need it, and they will constantly bluff you off of high value hands.
It’s worth repeating:
The higher the stakes are, the more important bluffing becomes to your game. You need to be able to win with as many avenues as possible. If you never bluff you are giving up an income stream.

 

[ekricket]

Bluffing is also an essential part of long term tournament success. If you are not winning tournaments, you should probably look at your bluffing game. Chips are life, and picking up pots that nobody else is interested in or has marginal holdings in is the difference between cashing in the money or donating your entry.
So if you never bluff - the only way you are going to win a tournament is to have the deck just hit you in the face over and over. It happens, but it’s rare and not frequent enough to make you a successful player.
The worst player in our group is a calling station. You can’t bluff her ever. But maybe one tournament out of twenty she places in the money simply by getting lucky in a few crucial spots where she is the massive underdog. She invests $400 in twenty tournaments and wins perhaps $100 back out of those. We love her.

 

[natumes]

Selecting the right hands to bluff with is another important aspect that I see many people disregard. Appropriate blockers/unblockers help tell your story.

I think a large portion of the players I play against think I bluff too often, simply because I tend to be one of the few people ever showing down a bluff (they don't bluff often enough, if ever, or give up on the river). I've adjusted against certain players so that I don't bluff without showdown value because they will call everytime. I got paid recently on a missed flush draw but I paired on the river. I jammed and was surprised when I got called (by bottom pair on the flop) and turned over my middle pair and it was good. Without the pair against that opponent I would have given up.

I actually prefer playing at more serious stakes because my bluffs work more often. People hate getting bluffed more than losing on a call, and when the call is trivial money they want to catch a bluff more than they care about losing.

 

[JustinInMN]

There's more money in being good at value betting than bluffing.

Both can compliment each other. But I think most opponents you should seek have a bias toward calling and bluffing has the added difficulty of getting someone to go against this nature.

To @ekricket 's point, in tournaments, it is important to find bluff spots and the threat of elimination does introduce one more reason for potential targets to fold hands.

But on the whole, I like to bluff sparingly into the opponents I seek and would rather just exploit their overcalling.

 

[Schmendr1ck]

I think a large portion of the players I play against think I bluff too often, simply because I tend to be one of the few people ever showing down a bluff (they don't bluff often enough, if ever, or give up on the river). I've adjusted against certain players so that I don't bluff without showdown value because they will call everytime. I got paid recently on a missed flush draw but I paired on the river. I jammed and was surprised when I got called (by bottom pair on the flop) and turned over my middle pair and it was good. Without the pair against that opponent I would have given up.

A lot of players confuse aggression with bluffing. They think that because you play hands aggressively, you must also be bluffing a lot.

It took years of playing with a very casual tourney group for me to figure this out and learn to take advantage of it in a player-dependent way. Some players I will (almost) never bluff, but I will value bet them with a ridiculously large range.

It sucks when you're card dead, but it's better than flushing chips down the toilet to the player who calls down with bottom pair because "you ALWAYS bluff!"

 

[ekricket]

A lot of players confuse aggression with bluffing. They think that because you play hands aggressively, you must also be bluffing a lot.

It took years of playing with a very casual tourney group for me to figure this out and learn to take advantage of it in a player-dependent way. Some players I will (almost) never bluff, but I will value bet them with a ridiculously large range.

It sucks when you're card dead, but it's better than flushing chips down the toilet to the player who calls down with bottom pair because "you ALWAYS bluff!"

I have this same image in our regular game, and I use the same value bet strategy as you and @JustinInMN. But I never ignore opportunities to pick up orphan pots no matter who is in the hand. But yeah, there are certain people that won’t “let me bluff” and when I have it I’ll bet their whole stack or mine on the River - even if it’s 20x the pot - or more because I know they will call “just to catch me bluffing”. When we play bounty tournaments I get a lot of bounty’s this way.

Is there a value bet thread? There should be if not.

 

[tabletalker7]

I always thought that a bluff should tell a story. If the story sounds believable then people will believe it. That is also why you can't bluff bad players. Bad players don't see the story you are telling.

 

[allforcharity]

I always thought that a bluff should tell a story. If the story sounds believable then people will believe it. That is also why you can't bluff bad players. Bad players don't see the story you are telling.

Of course you can bluff bad players. It also kinda depends on how they are "bad". If they have poor risk tolerance, then you can take them for all they have, with any hand, at almost any time.

 

[tabletalker7]

Of course you can bluff bad players. It also kinda depends on how they are "bad". If they have poor risk tolerance, then you can take them for all they have, with any hand, at almost any time.

If they understand the concept of risk and have a set tolerance to it, they are not all bad.

 

[ekricket]

Of course you can bluff bad players. It also kinda depends on how they are "bad". If they have poor risk tolerance, then you can take them for all they have, with any hand, at almost any time.

When all they have is a King and think that’s pretty good preflop and worth calling a 5x big blind they are bad. Yes, there are players who have been playing for years that still think this. Pot odds, hand ranges, position, all meaningless topics to them. May as well be trying to teach them quantum mechanics with tinker toys as props.
Poker to them is like betting on black or red on a roulette wheel. It’s 50/50, you either win or lose. Worse than playing at a table of sharks if you want to play poker. If you want to gamble and have a jolly good time it’s great.

 

[Schmendr1ck]

Of course you can bluff bad players. It also kinda depends on how they are "bad".

This.

Many bad players - like fit or fold types - are extremely bluffable, and you can pick up tons of tiny pots from them. Others will never fold any piece of the board, and will even hero call "that damned Schmendr1ck who bluffs too much" with A-high a lot.

Like always in poker, you just have to recognize the player type and adjust accordingly.

 

[JustinInMN]

I always thought that a bluff should tell a story. If the story sounds believable then people will believe it. That is also why you can't bluff bad players. Bad players don't see the story you are telling.

Agreed, and I usually pick up the ones that don't. This does require a pretty good understanding of how the opponents look at the game and once you have that, you can certainly decide which rivers tell the story that might get a given opponent to fold. That's like giving yourself extra outs .

 

[davislane]

https://twitter.com/x/status/1547466532891922432

 

[boltonguy]

I think that generally having equity when called is key to bluffing successfully.
In the clip above, the BB has more suited hands in his range, holds a club making it less likely that his opponent has made the flush on the river, and based on the runout it is very likely his opponent has Kx. His opponent cant really call a jam to this line. Great play and he got lucky with the river card. Huge amount of pressure on TP hand with the flush coming in.
And as noted above knowing your opponent. Never fire a bluff into a massive calling station.

 

[upNdown]

Chances are the flop won’t help. Won’t help you and won’t help your opponent.

If you’ve missed, and you suspect your opponent has too, don’t let him put you on the defensive. You should be the one putting them on the defensive. Now they have to defend a bluff instead of driving one.

This is the one I’m constantly reminding myself of. You hear it said often (but maybe not often enough) it isn’t easy to make a pair. Assuming you’re two -way to the flop, of course.
Multi-way? Ugh, that flop helped somebody. But something I was reminded of while watching the WSOP this year - you can still bluff away at it. Guys aren’t going to hang around often, multi-way, if they’re out of position with a middle pair.

 

[RagahRagah]

Key thing is perception. Bluffing doesn't mean much without a good read. Early on in my poker playing career I would just pick spots to bluff based on my being a conservative player and usually get caught despite being a rock at the time. I'd like to think I learned a few things (like all-in moves are more suspicious) and now I pick those spots much more carefully.

If your reads are solid you can bluff more. But it still takes guts. One of the hardest things I had to realize as I tried to improve my game is that no matter how careful you are, if you are going to have any success you have to take risks. But the more reckless you are the more you will pay for it.

 

[davislane]

Bleff vs Bleff.

Such a good hand. This is POKER!!!

 

[Highli99]

Remember game theory which is key to success in bluffing. Particularly your bluff to value frequency. Assuming pot sized bluff you want a 2:1 ratio to create a perfect indifference from opponents with bluff callers. It's pretty simple actually. Get that wrong and you become exploitable.

 

[PlaidDragon]

Don’t start talking.

This.

I make it a point to never speak if I'm in a hand. It may come off as rude in some situations, but I probably leak information like a sieve so why make it worse by volunteering information.

 

[Mongoose]

^^^ absolutely the same thought process for myself and I’d think the best strategy for most. However, the flip side is if chatting it up is your personality and/or table image, then that could
be the play