The Yoga of Bluffing

The allure of the bluff provides fascination and intrigue, but mostly for people who’ve never in their lives played poker seriously. Those of us with experience know that, because the pot provides an incentive for opponents to stick around, bluffs should be the exception rather than the rule. If you bluff more often than you value bet, your opponents will always have the pot odds to call you — and they will call you. But even though it’s not as sexy as the general public might think, the bluff is an absolutely essential element of our game. In fact, there would be no poker without it.

I’m often surprised then, to find so many intermediate and even semi-professional players who are utterly disdainful of the bluff. Don’t get me wrong — people love to bluff and win. But they absolutely hate to bluff and get caught. Especially in brick-and-mortar poker, risk aversion rules the day, and some players talk themselves out of bluffing for no better reason than that they’re afraid they might lose. This is the worst possible rationale for a play, as fear of losing is a death sentence in competitive poker.

My personal approach to dealing with the tricks human psychology plays on my brain, as it tries to get me to play worse poker, is to confront the problem with raw, unencumbered logic. I’ll give some examples. 1) Many players seem to feel that bluffs should only be risked when there’s a high probability of their success. Simple math argues otherwise. A half-pot-sized bluff needs only to work once every three tries to make a break-even proposition. If your bluffs usually work, it probably means you’re not bluffing enough. 2) Tournament players in particular often fear going broke on a bluff, or even a semi-bluff. I’ve illustrated many problems with this line of thinking in previous columns, but I’ll give another. If you never go all-in without a hand, it becomes a lot harder for you to get called, and hence a lot harder to double up, and a lot harder to make a deep run in the tournament. Part of the reason to bluff — a big part — is to increase the chance of getting paid on value bets. 3) Many intermediate players feel embarrassed when they’re caught bluffing. Why? Everyone gets dealt more bad hands than good hands, and everyone’s good hands occasionally turn into bluffs when the cards don’t fall their way. In any number of these situations, a bluff is the best play. Why would anyone be embarrassed about executing the best play? It makes no sense, but sometimes neither does human nature.

Even with all of the above logic on our side, the sad truth is that it’s often relatively easy to make a convincing argument against bluffing. One only has to say the magic words, “I don’t bluff bad players,” and the argument is over. Everyone knows that non-thinking players either call or fold based solely on the strength of their own hands, and so it’s completely counterproductive to try to make them fold a pair, let alone anything bigger. This conventional wisdom is accurate, and even I can’t find fault with it. The problem is, it’s also a convenient excuse to remove bluffing from your arsenal.

If you encounter a truly terrible player, then sure, follow the “I don’t bluff the bad ones” maxim and go about your value betting business. But it’s 2012. How many terrible players are left? Furthermore, how far do you expect to get in your poker career if you can only beat the calling stations? It’s a slippery slope from not bluffing against bad players, to not bluffing against mediocre players, to not bluffing against anyone. The slope is especially slippery because most poker players vastly underrate the skill level of their opponents (and overrate themselves).

Players who are reluctant to bluff often realize instinctively that they’re not betting enough hands, and so they start betting the river with middle pair (or some similar hand that’s neither a value bet nor a bluff) and have no idea whether their actions make any sense. They only know they don’t want to bluff. My advice is, until you’ve found an opponent who has proven he or she won’t fold, err on the side of bluffing in your close decisions.

I’m not immune to the psychological pitfalls affecting the rest of humanity. In my last three poker trips I had four big river bluffs get called, and I started to question my aggressiveness. That’s only natural. But in the cold light of day, I remembered a few river bluffs that worked, and also a few value bets that probably worked because my opponents had seen me bluff earlier. I concluded that one of my four failed bluffs was ill-advised, but the other three were good plays that just didn’t work out. I used logic, not a knee-jerk emotional reaction, to make these assessments.

Every poker player must make peace with bluffing in order to have success in this game. If you love bluffing, you’ll inevitably give away too chips. If you’re afraid or embarrassed to bluff, you’ll never move beyond an intermediate level of play. If you find the appropriate bluffing balance, you might also find a few final tables to go along with it. ♠

Matt Matros is the author of The Making of a Poker Player. He is also a featured coach for cardrunners.com.