The Art of Bluffing in Poker

It’s a skill that takes practice and experience to cultivate, but if done well the psychological impact of bluffing is immense, making your opponents less inclined to call you on the downside while giving you fuller control of how the game unfolds.

The most effective bluffers convey confidence and don’t think too hard, revealing very little, looking very little, to the opponents. They also keep a strong handle on what kinds of images their opponents perpetuate and/withhold.

Game theory

Success at bluffing in poker demands a knowledge of people on the psychological level, as well as a level of strategic literacy. You must know your opponents and their styles of play as much as you must know your emotional processes and any underlying tendencies towards bluffery.

Experiment with your own bluffing strategy: familiarise yourself with GTO ideas, play with various frequencies, and try to read the feedback local players are transmitting to you. Seek coaching, if necessary.

Your bluffs should have just enough value and frequency to win some pots without being punished for their predictability or exploitability; your good bluffs should represent specific hands enough times to make them be more believable and thus have more odds to be successful. But also your blockers and auto-folds need to be blocked enough (if your enemy has hands such as king-high then perhaps that should be considered an auto-fold – do not bluff them!).

Detection strategies

In this way, bluffing is a tactic where a player changes the odds and wears down their rivals. But it’s important to develop your bluffing skills is a reputable manner so that it works in your favour when it should and doesn’t tip-off your rivals when it fails to pay off.

The tells you should learn are your opponent’s tells: when he sits up straighter and maintains his steady eye contact long after the flop, or doesn’t hold that steady gaze afterwards. He bets more often and for larger sums.

These signals can be very difficult to spot. One of the giveaways for this disinformation is when players become stiff. If they look like they’re in a panic, that can be a great opportunity to bluff. When you start raising and throwing money into the middle, and you’re not telling the truth, and you just create a fog of war around your cards, making your opponent believe you’ve got the nuts, your opponent is going to fold much more often… A bluff like that is changing the game in the immediate moment, and you’re going to win more pots.

Bluffing

In poker, bluffing is an important part of gameplay: if you’re good at it, you can get other players to fold, at times when you’d actually be beaten were they to show their cards. As such, bluffing adds an additional level of psychology and strategy to the game, and thus makes it more than just a card-passing fun.

But bluffing can be a highly rewarding way to make a profit, provided it is done well using all the skills – knowing our opponent’s tells and then working out what type of bet fits in with our plan to make them call. We also have to work out our look and how to control our emotions. How likely is that hand and when can I bluff them into calling?

Bluffers should take the stakes of their game and the number of players at their table into consideration when determining how much to bluff. They should generally put in the same size bet on a regular basis when they attempt such a manoeuvre, so as to make it harder for their opponents to detect any regularities in their bluffing pattern. They should also avoid calling bluffs too often (they should value-bet, instead).

Reading your opponents

With a good command of your opponent’s tendencies (ie, how he bluffs), you can then make the right decisions with respect to whether to call, or to bluff yourself: never call your opponent’s bluff when he is not bluffing, and never be called for bluffing when you are not actually trying to bluff. If you don’t fear an opponent’s bluff if he is actually bluffing, then you might wrongly fold on a hand that otherwise would have won. Likewise, if you do fall for an opponent’s bluff when he is actually bluffing, he will not know that you are a pushover. When he is scared, and when his ego is so big that going bust would have no impact on him, then – if you call yourself – you would want those opponents to know it and fear you.

Bluffing is an essential part of poker, as long as you don’t overuse it or you’ll end up losing every cent in your bankroll. Before making a bluff you have to take into consideration: 1) dynamic of game; 2) how many players are at table; 3) how it’s been playing your opponent, what his/her image is, what tendency is he/she showing in the hand you’re considering; 4) how much do you have to bet – you should bet as little as possible in order to be convincive for other opponents.