Without bluffing, we have to have the best hand to win the pot…

& Making good hands in Hold’em is hard! Even making a pair in Hold’em is hard sometimes!

With well-timed bluffs we manage a few things, we allow ourselves to:

• Win pots without having the best hand
• Win bigger pots when we are called and make a hand
• For the times when our bluffs don’t work this will buy us action for when we actually make a hand in future pots!

Bluffing can be a sensitive subject for players that are learning to play, as getting caught in a bluff and losing a stack can be a horrible feeling, however, without doing this at least a small percentage of the time we will simply be too easy to read as someone who only bets when they have it, therefore we won’t get action with our good hands. Which also hurts us greatly.

So we need to have a balanced range of value bets and bluffs in our arsenal in order to stay an aggressive unpredictable and profitable opponent in the Hold’em streets.

What hands should we bluff with and when?

Good bluff candidates to merge into our 3bet preflop strategy are hands like suited connectors, as even if we are building a pot against a tight opponent who has us beat, in the long run, we are still going to have 35-40% equity.
As for when we should start bluffing, the simple answer is ASAP, the sooner we get aggressive, the sooner we can win chips without making a hand, our opponents can fold to our aggression pre-flop or if we get to a flop and continuation bet (Cbet) and take down the pot when our opponent misses the board we win then also.

As a general rule, we want to bet more early on in pots and less towards later streets, as by the later the streets our opponents are less likely to have stronger holdings and thus more equity on these boards compared to any bluffs we are going to have.

We are going to have some easy pots to bluff at…

Sometimes we will just have good boards to bluff on like J Q 2 when we have hands like KT or T9 giving us an open-ended straight draw, boards like this will allow us to bet and possibly continue to bet depending on run outs.

We will want to continue to bluff less or boards like this when we are called but the texture doesn’t change, for instance, say the runout is J Q 2 4 6 rainbow and we chose to double barrel, meaning we bet flop and turn, now on the river we don’t have a lot of showdown value, only really beating hands like T9 so mostly to get to the river our opponent is going to have a strong holding and with so much invested they will probably not be looking to fold on this run out. So bluffing here less often is definitely going to be wise.

Tougher bluffs to work into our game

There are going to be boards where we may have taken the reigns PreFlop and we flop a small amount of equity such as a backdoor flush draw, or backdoor straight draw, or just nothing at all. Well in those situations it could be good to bluff a certain percentage of the time as a delayed Cbet, this will make our delayed betting range balanced and allows us to take at least one street of action out of our barrels, saving us money for the times we fire two bullets and giving us extra information if our opponent checks twice to us rather than picking up the betting lead themselves.

Example:

We 3bet preflop with 6♠ 7♠ and the flop is K♠ 9♣ 2♣

We could bluff this flop sometimes and continue betting on cards like any spade ♠ and any 8 as both of those would give us a good draw and allow us to either win the pot there with this added pressure of another bet or build a pot for if we hit the river.

We could also check this flop back and work this into our range of hands that we may play similarly if we had a value hand like QQ, JJ, TT that may not be able to get 3 streets of value on a King high board but may win bets from hands like A9, Q9, J9, T9, 88, 77, 66, 55 etc.

Although delayed Cbetting these boards with hands like 7 high may seem like a daunting prospect we need a balanced range, so what better hands to add in that a hand with little to no equity to balance out our strong holdings that will often look to check back to get to showdown.

Make sure you know if you are bluffing or not!

Try not to turn hands into a bluff that have good showdown value, make up your mind that you will either try and take your hand to showdown or you will need to bluff your opponent off their equity, this is a classic mistake players that are learning will make, they will be bluffing with middling hands that have good equity to win the pot without bluffing.

It’s always better to play pot control with those types of holdings and look to blast off with either side of your range be it value or a bluff. This way you will get into less sticky situations.