One Last Shot!
Bluffing is an art!
You should have noticed by now, that while Michiel is the more frequent analytical math kid, I am in fact more a feel-player.
I base a lot of my plays on my instinct, need to be on my game for a session to be successful and tend to be able to either blow up big or destroy a single opponent in the process of cleaning out his chip stack.
This has always surprised me myself quite a lot.
Especially since I hardly ever bluff. Sure, I make continuation bets and I have been found to shoot an additional bullet when it’s crystal clear the other guy is on complete air, but the assessment that I’m clearly on the weakest hand and try to push a guy of his winner is almost never to be found in my arsenal.
That’s mostly because I’m conditioned like that. With maniacs like Jeroen, Jonas en Thomas W. it’s never wise to go jerking around a pot when you know you’ll have a hard time inducing a lay down.
If I have to push someone of the best hand, it’s usually people like Michiel or Jessica and nowadays you don’t just steal away pots from them.
Unfortunately nobody can tell you how to bluff, the entire purpose of a bluff is making an action that is deceptive and unpredictable, but there are a few things you can keep in mind.
First of all, there I go again, train your read. Somewhere in the future I’ll probably make an article with some tips to do this, but until then, try to better your insight in your table by watching it a lot.
Without a decent read, no bluff! You can not go stabbing around in the dark. When your table is a mystery to you, there is no use in trying to play them. While looking for tells you’re the most vulnerable you’ll ever be around a table, so that’s a time for tight straight forward poker, not for plays.
Once you’ve established the table tendencies, it’s time to pick a victim. Sure, you can have tables where everybody can be bluffed and in fact everybody CAN be bluffed, but not everybody is as easy to fool and some players rule out bluffing against them because they just flatcall about everything where they hit something.
The victim you pick should be a tight aggressive player. You choose tight because loose players tend to drown out your bluffs and are rarely scared by one more bet. Bluffs against them need to be scary by size and believe me, they’re scary as it is without having to pump into astronomical proportions. Bluffing to loose players is to be kept as a rare diamond and only brought out when you are really confident.
You choose aggressive, because passive players tend to let you control the pot too much and just follow your lead even if they have mediocre holdings. They are there to make your draws interesting and your monsters paid of. For all other purposes they are not good material to bluff against. While a loose player is bluffable from time to time, a passive player is almost never! Mind you that we are talking about a player type, not a strategy picking, and that I have nothing against passive tactical decisions, but that you should make a very strong division between tactics and tendencies. Mostly because passive tactical decisions don’t last and usually include the willingness to lay down doubtfull hands, passive tendencies usually point out a weak player, and when it comes to weak players, there is one golden rule: Never bluff the amateur. He has no idea what he himself is playing, let alone he starts thinking about everything you could have!
While trying to bluff off opponents you’ll notice how it gets gradually harder to fire another bullet when the hand develops. Bluffing on the flop has become so standard that this is actually not a bluff anymore. It’s a continuation bet. You bet out because you want to know what your chances in this pot are, and because you of course learned by now to keep your C-betting 
within the same ranges as betting your monsters, people generally only respond when they really have something. This only goes, of course, when you are willing to follow up on your bets. When you do hit, you need to let the other guy bleed! Because people don’t want to be on a decision every street of the way on their fishy hands, they’ll lay down easier when the pot is still small. But a lot of small pots are just as well as a few big ones.
And then off course there is the second and third bullet.
Firing a second bullet is pretty common. By flatcalling on the flop your opponent could indicate some sort of a draw or endangered pair and an obvious blank to the draw or extra overcard might be enough to push someone away to your bluff.
The third bullet is a whole different story. By the river the hands should be made, no draws, 3 betting rounds of information. Normally by now people tend to know whether their opponent has a hand or not. Bluffing here requires … for lack of a better term … balls of steel! In order to pull this off, you should be sure that you were up against a draw that didn’t come off or pick up that last bit of hesitation in your opponent.
Even the greats of the game find it hard to successfully fire a third bullet. It’s somewhat of an unwritten rule that you can mess around on flop and turn, but never ever on the river. Betting there is mostly quite the substantial part of your stack and if someone wasn’t willing to let go on flop or turn, why should he be on the river?
You will have noticed by now that this article was mainly about “real” bluffs, not trying to push around with a draw to back you up, no strong middle or bottom pair, nothing but clean air!
I’ll cover the semi-bluff on a later occasion. Not only is it a topic on itself, but the strategic ideas behind it are completely different to act out.
Well, so far for bluffing
If you still have questions, come see us. That is, if you can stand the crossfire.
The Mad Man
