If you want to increase your edge at the tables even further, make sure to check the Pokercoaching training site.
…
Knowing when and how to bluff is one of the most important poker skills. If you play waiting just for big hands and to cooler your opponents, you’ll be a small winner at best.
If you want to win big in poker and do so consistently, you need to improve your bluffing game!
In this article, I’ll provide you with my bluffing framework, which will give you a roadmap for almost every situation. But before diving into it, here are a few terms that you should know:
- Auto calls – hands that your opponents will easily call with when you bet
- Auto folds – hands that they will fold almost always facing a bet
- Blockers – relevant cards in your hand that make it less likely that the opponent has certain hands
With these key terms explained, we can proceed to the main part of this article, which will help you become much better at bluffing.
The Bluffing Decision Framework
To win in poker, you need to bluff, but this only works if you pick the right spots. Picking these spots, however, isn’t easy, especially for those new to the game. Using this decision framework, you can choose the correct spots much more easily by answering the following questions:
- Is my opponent capable of folding? If you believe that the player doesn’t like to fold, you should be less inclined to bluff in general.
- Do you have a showdown value? If you have a hand with some showdown value on a relatively non-coordinated board, you should be less inclined to bluff – and vice versa.
- Do you have many value hands in your range? Are there many logical value hands that you’d play this way? If there are, you should be more inclined to bluff on the river.
- Are your blockers highly relevant? If you have good blockers to the nuts, like A♠ on a three-spades board, you should be more inclined to bluff, as you can credibly represent the nuts.
- Do you unblock auto-folds? This one can be tricky, but you should look at your hand and figure out if you have cards in your hand that would block hands in your opponent’s range that would automatically fold to a bet.
- Are you telling a credible story? If you had a value hand, is this how you would play it from your opponent’s point of view?
Figuring Out Correct Sizing
Once you go through the above steps and decide there are enough reasons to warrant a bluff, the next thing to decide is how big or small the bet should be.
In the GTO poker world, you should use mixed frequencies with your entire range. With this framework, I’m giving you a simplified version, which is easier to remember and still provides you with a plan to mix things up.
- Do you have any showdown value? If you have no SD value whatsoever, you should be inclined to bet bigger as you don’t want your opponent to hero-call with a hand like A-high or a bottom pair.
- Does the opponent have a lot of marginal made hands? When they have a lot of middle-pair type of hands on a three-flush board, for example, you’ll want to use bigger sizing to make it harder for them to call.
- Good hands or nothing? Using the same logic, if the opponent’s range consists of good hands (like made flushes) and nothing-hands (like busted straight draws), you want to use smaller sizing. They’ll fold their non-hands anyway, and they’re not folding their strong hands regardless of the sizing.
- Do you block many nut hands? If you have a blocker to the nuts, you can bet big, as you can represent the nuts, and you know they can’t have the nuts.
- Are you trying to get the opponent to fold a big hand? When you believe the opponent to hold a strong hand, like a solid top pair, for example, you’ll want to bet bigger and make their decision more difficult.
- Are you representing a nutted hand? There are many scenarios where you’ll have fairly strong hands in your range, like top pairs with good kickers. This is where you’ll want to bet smaller with your value hands and your bluffs because you aren’t trying to represent the nuts.
A Practical Example
Let’s now put this decision framework to the test using an example hand. Say you open to 3x with 7♣5♣, and the opponent in the big blind, who you perceive as weak-tight, calls.
The flop comes 10♦9♦4♥, you bet one-third, and the opponent calls. The turn is 9♠, and the action goes check-check.
The river is 6♣, and the big blind checks. Should you or should you not bluff in this spot, and if yes, what sizing should you use?
Let’s go through the framework:
- Is our opponent capable of folding – if we perceive them as weak-tight, this means they’re definitely capable of folding and have no problems releasing weak hands.
- Do we have any showdown value – absolutely not, as we only have 7-high.
- Are we representing many strong hands on the river – not so much?
- Are we unblocking auto-folds – hands that will auto-fold are hands like KQ, KJ, QJ, Q8, and missed diamonds, and we don’t have any of those cards, so we are unblocking all obvious folds.
- Is our story credible – this is between yes and no and will depend a lot on the opponent. There are some tens in our range that we can credibly check on the turn and bet for value on the river. Against weak-tight opponents, betting makes more sense, as they’ll be more inclined to fold.
Looking at all the factors, we come up with a decision that this is a hand we want to bluff with – there are more reasons for than against it. So now, we use the decision framework in the same way to determine the size to use.
We have no showdown value whatsoever, but we are trying to get the opponent off a marginal hand, probably a pair of fours or some Ace and King-highs. A hand like a pair of tens or any nine is never folding here.
The hand we can credibly represent is something like a pair of tens, or a pocket pair lower than tens, like pocket eights.
So, with all this in mind, this is a spot where we want to use a smaller size, betting 50% of the pot. This is the smallest bet size recommended by GTO on the river, so this is what we’re going for.
Conclusion
Picking the right spots to bluff in and sizing your bluffs in accordance with the goal you want to achieve and the story you’re trying to tell can be tricky.
Hopefully, this decision framework will help you do it the right way. Try and practice with it as much as possible, and whenever you find yourself in a spot where you’re thinking about bluffing, go through these steps.
In time, it will become your second nature, and your bluffs will become much more successful!
