A lot of poker strategy content revolves around the preflop, flop, and turn action. The reason why rivers aren’t the focus of our attention is because your river plays are predicated so much on what you do on previous streets.
If you get to a river and realize that you don’t know what hands you should be bluffing or value betting with, you probably made a mistake on the flop or the turn.
In today’s article, we’ll focus on finding the best bluffing spots on different rivers depending on the action on previous streets, but we’ll also think about value bets and, in general, hands that we want to reopen action with.
Main Takeaways
This lesson will try and cover a few central points that should help you shape an optimal bluffing strategy for different rivers.
As mentioned, these decisions will stem heavily from your actions on previous streets.
Other things we’ll be focusing on are:
- Learning to give up bluffs on every street: on every street, you’ll need to give up a certain percentage of your bluffs, doing a lot of checking with our air.
- Properly evaluating your ranges: the main idea is to check some and bluff some with a wide variety of hands, allowing us to have bluffs on different types of runouts.
- Recognizing board-changing cards
- Properly sizing your river bluffs compared to your value bets
Biggest Mistakes With Bluffing Rivers
One of the biggest mistakes weaker players tend to make is that they bluff with all their non-showdown hands before the river.
Because of this, when they check flops and turns, they’re left with weak hands, and they struggle to find good bluffing candidates on rivers.
These players tend to bet too linear on flops and turns, so they end up having very little value bets to reopen the action on the river after checking the turn.
One key notion to keep in mind is this: in order for your river bluffs to be effective, you must also have value bets in your range.
When it comes to selecting your bluffing hands, there are two approaches.
In some scenarios, you can use blockers, which is easy on certain types of boards (i.e., when you’re holding cards blocking straights and flushes) but not so easy on other textures.
The other approach is to ignore the blockers and just bluff with your absolutely worst hands, and this one is much easier.
My advice is to use blockers in obvious spots, and for all other scenarios, go with the bottom-up approach, where you bluff with the worst hands you reach the river with.
River Bluffing Examples
With the theory out of the way, let’s look at some hand examples where we reach rivers in different ways to understand how we should be building our bluffing ranges.
Hand 1
On a seven-handed table and with blinds being 300/600, we open to 1,400 from the lojack with Q♥J♣. The big blind makes the call with stacks being equal (29 big blinds), and we proceed to the flop of 9♦7♥5♥.
The big blind checks and the action is on us. All three options are completely fine here: we can check back, bet small, or bet big.
We still have a range advantage of this board and, to some extent, the nut advantage, since at 30 big blinds deep, any overpair is pretty much the nuts.
In this particular example, we check back, but one question to think about is – what stronger hands would we be checking here?
According to a solver, we want to be checking some of our weaker top pairs, such as Q9, J9, and T9, as these are hands that we can’t really get three streets of value with. Even aces and kings are checking some of the time here.
On top of this, we check back with some of our very strong hands, i.e., all flopped sets have some percentage of check-backs.
After we check, the turn comes the 10♣.
At this juncture, we have two options: bet large or check back. Betting big makes sense as the hands we’ll be betting for value will be top pairs (T-x) and overpairs. By checking back, we allow ourselves to make an easy call on different rivers and even go for bluff raises on certain cards (like the flush-completing ones).
We opt for a big bet and make it 3,000. The opponent calls, and we arrive at the 10♠ river. They check once again.
Given the fact we arrived to this river with queen-high, we definitely want to bluff. The question is, what sizing do we pick?
To determine this, we need to go back to our actions on previous streets and figure out what value hands we would be playing this way (check the flop and bet big on the turn).
A majority of our value range contains a ten, and our only correct sizing is to move all in, over-betting the pot. The reasoning is quite simple – we get more value with our tens and more fold equity with our bluffs!
Hand 2
In this example, we start with 25 big blinds effective and make a standard 2x open from the hijack with K♥Q♠. The big blind calls, the flop comes J♠5♦5♥, and they check.
In this particular scenario, with 25 big blinds deep, the nut advantage doesn’t matter as much, so we’ll be continuing a lot. As we get deeper, however, there will be more checking back involved.
It is interesting to look at some hands that solvers suggest as check-backs on this flop, such as 98 and T9. These are the types of hands that people rarely check back, but are actually quite good candidates as we can call on many different turns and use them as river bluffs when we don’t improve.
In this particular hand, I decided to check back, and we proceeded to the 2♦ turn. The big blind checks once more.
This is the spot where I’d start thin value-betting hands like AK and even AQ, and the solver agrees. Now, we can also start bluffing with the hands I mentioned earlier, such as 67 and 89.
KQo, however, is a check a big percentage of the time in this spot, so that’s the option we go for and arrive to the river of 8♠. The big blind checks.
Unlike the previous hand, this is one where we don’t really need to bluff a lot on the river. We can check back and expect to win fairly frequently against hands like T9 and T7 and occasionally lose against some ace high hands.
Summary
There are many factors to consider when deciding what rivers to bluff on, with what hands, and how to properly size your bluffs and value bets.
We’ve covered several major ideas in this article to get you on the right track. There is much more theory that could be covered, but the concepts and hand examples in this lesson should give you a good idea of what the main factors that come into play are.
The bottom line is, you want to have some river bluffs in your arsenal, but to be effective with these, you need to start preparing them on previous streets and have a good idea of what your range looks like and what it is that you’re trying to represent when that final card hits the board.
