Four Reasons Why You Should Semibluff More Often

You hear funny advice in poker. The best one I’ve heard to date is “you are either bluffing or you’re not — there’s no such thing as an in-between”. Well. No. That’s wrong. A semibluff is an extremely important part of any winning player’s game. Here’s why.

A semibluff is a bet designed to induce folds from better hands. The kicker is that if your bluff is called, then you have a backup plan in the form of being able to hit a draw. So it’s kind of like a weaker version of value bet combined with the concept of bluffing your opponent and having him fold a better hand.

If you aren’t semibluffing to match your value bets, then you should be. Here are four pretty darn good reasons why:

Because You Can

Let’s say you’re in the final stages of a tournament. It’s three-handed. You can taste victory. You are dealt Q J on the button with 40 big blind stacks. You raise preflop to three big blinds, the small blind folds and the big blind decides to reraise you to eight big blinds. Yours is a playable hand, but probably not one with which you want to go all in preflop. So you call. You see a flop.

The flop comes 9 8 4 and your opponent bets eight big blinds into a 16.5 big blind pot. This is a no brainer all-in because we know our opponent will be betting and folding hands like K-Q and A-J in this spot. Calling is probably a winning play with such a powerful draw, but we can do better by going all-in. The ability to take down the pot uncontested is a huge boon to our potential value for this hand. We’d also make the same play for value with hands like pocket kings that we might slow play preflop and the occasional A-9. We don’t’ want to give away information by playing in an unbalanced way.

The beauty of semibluffs is that we can use them more often than bluffs that have no added equity when called. Semibluffs are just as deceptive as a normal bluff, but that extra equity allows us to bluff with a higher frequency. More bluffs means thinner value bets and potentially more pots won uncontested. It also means being called by worse hands if our opponent doesn’t want to be run over by our constant betting. All this adds up to a kick-butt poker strategy that’s tough to counter.

Always Have a Backup Plan

Additional equity means your opponent has a more difficult time justifying optimistic calls. Imagine you’re the other player in the above example. If you bet a hand like A-K and know that your opponent could be going all-in with hands like K-Q offsuit, then calling is extremely likely to be profitable. Our opponent is bluffing too often and has little equity if we are ahead. Betting and calling A-K here is a booyah-kasha winning fist-pump of a play. Check the math if you don’t believe me.

On the other hand, if you know that when you call that you’re either behind an already made hand or it’s going to be a close outcome because the all-in player will always have live cards and equity to boot, then you have a difficult decision. Even when your opponent is bluffing, you’re not quite out of the woods by making the “right decision” by calling his all-in. His goal is to make your life hell when you have a medium strength hand like A-K on this board. And hell hath no fury at the poker table like a correct dosage of semibluffs.

The concept, and this is important, is that it’s much easier to make your opponents’ decisions more difficult by bluffing with equity, just in case you are called.

Your Other Bluffs Improve

If you’re semibluffing one set of hands then another set of your bluffs can become even scarier on certain board run outs.

This idea requires a new example. We are playing heads up. Both players have 100 big blinds. We raise with 10 9 preflop. The big blind calls. The flop is J 8 3. We are checked to; we bet; we get called. The turn is the 3. We are checked to; we bet; we get called. The river is the K for a final board of J 8 3 3 K. We are checked to; we bet; our opponent shows A 8 and folds.

Because our opponent knows we are semibluffing when we bluff on earlier streets, he does well to fear particular board developments. We can take advantage of our opponent’s perception of particular board run outs by bluffing more than our fair share. Better players might assume you are bluffing too often here and call down lighter. It’s up to you to learn against whom you’re playing and the player’s tendencies. The great thing about semibluffing is that doing it correctly adds a level of complexity to the game that you have the ability to champion. Study how your bluffs work in tandem with your overall strategy and your poker game becomes all the more powerful.

Bluff, Then Fight Back

Typical bluffs are forced to fold when facing a raise. You have nothing. Your opponent raises. You have no hope if you are called. You fold. But by semibluffing and ensuring that you have enough equity to bluff and then call or reraise, you might continue your deception to the next street. Even better than the deception is the ability to realize the equity of a draw you might use as a bluff.

Picture you are against an extremely aggressive player. He bets almost every flop after raising preflop and he likes to fight back against check-raises by coming over the top of them with another raise. We need equity to fight back against this player on boards like A 8 5.

Imagine if this aggressive opponent raises preflop on the button and we call in the big blind with K J. The flop is the same A 8 5 and we decide to check-raise this player when he bets. As we thought he might, he comes over the top with a raise. We decide that we’ve had enough and decide to go all-in on the flop. He instantly calls us with A J and we’re drawing to a runner-runner straight. Not good.

Now think about the same action on the same A 8 5 board, but we have 7 6. We check-raise and our opponent reraises us. We know he is going to be folding to our all-in some of the time and that when we are called that we still have a great chance to win the hand. Even against the A J above, with 7 6 we will win the hand about 56.5 percent of the time.

Unfortunately, we can’t have an open-ended straight-flush draw every time we will want to check-raise as a bluff. The point is that there are good hands to choose for bluffing and hands that don’t make the cut because of how little equity they have when called. On some boards, there are no great draws and so you are forced to bluff without much of a backup plan. Proceed with caution on these boards. But on the boards you are able to semibluff, you better believe that it’s going to be the best money making play available to you when you do want to bluff. Being able to throw a mound of chips at your opponent and say “I really don’t care what happens here,” is an extremely powerful tool and part of what creates the maniacal image that gets your big hands paid.

Until next time, happy semi-bluffing! ♠

Reid Young is a lead poker video instructor at TransformPoker.com For more information on semi-bluffing and other poker strategy follow @TransformPoker on Twitter