I’ve been reading some forum posts and some people are embarrassed to show their bluffs. I don’t quite understand why. For me, it’s just part of the game. Bluffing allows you scoop up more pots, and more importantly, gives your opponent a reason to call your value bets. We’ve all played against nits, against whom we can easily fold second best. I would say a playing a nit style isn’t the most profitable as your opponents will rarely give you action.
Personally, I would be proud to show my bluffs and how I can come up with bluffs in least expected spots. I think that is a much harder skill to learn than value betting. However, I don’t actually show my bluffs as I want to continue exploiting my opponents.
What are your opinions on bluffing? Do you like or not?
I like bluffing. As you said, it’s part of the game. Without bluffing you can win with your cards, with it, you can win with your cards or your chips.
Showing the occasional bluff doesn’t mean you can’t bluff any more. Show more value than buffs and they will never know what to do.
Show a bluff and a lot of people move to trap mode. These guys will give you way too many free draws, and often pay you when you hit. Changes in their betting patterns will let you know when this is happening, so you can stop bluffing.
Nits might suspect you are bluffing, but usually won’t have the cards or the stones to find out for sure.
The “standard” anti-bluffing advice I hear is “wait for a hand, then trap!” They might as well turn their hole cards up. They miss so much value, give so many free draws, pay off so many times, that it’s like printing chips.
Bluffing is an essential part of the game of poker. You have 3 options towards it. Call it, raise it or fold to it. There is no crying in poker( or was that baseball) lol.
I hear commentators say things like “Can’t believe player A is keeping this hand. It doesn’t even beat some of player B’s bluffs.”
Folks on here refer to someone not having enough bluffs in their range.
Is this to say that bluffs are triggered when you’re dealt particular cards? ANY help with these statements would be great. tks
I bluff quite often but I never show my cards - regardless if it was a bluff or a value bet. Don’t give your opponents any unnecessary information about your playing style.
Bluffing is the reason poker is such a great game and it is what makes it so interesting. If no one ever bluffed in poker I wouldn’t bother playing it. Bluffing is the foundation of poker and without it poker wouldn’t be the same.
I don’t show my bluffs. That’s when I am in a live game. When I’m online I don’t bluff at all and I show my cards very often. I tried to bluff online when I first started in 2003, and I wasn’t successful with it. I watched it not work for so many that I decided it wasn’t a good fit for my internet game and haven’t ever used it.
I believe that bluffing in poker is an integral part of the game.
The bluff helps you break free from a difficult time in poker.
The bluff is healthy when you play right and have good cards.
When you are a poker player and you only play with bluffs, then the God of poker comes and punishes you. This is what all of us who play poker have faced.
I rarely consider myself to be bluffing, though some think I was when I show them the cards. That’s because I often play bottom pair the same way I do the nuts I also show often, so even when I lose, they see I had a great draw or something worth betting. If I’m betting I usually think I have the best hand.
We all know perfectly well that sometimes we are extremely unlucky (many games can pass without even a pair), yet sometimes we seem to get strong hands all the time. So of course luck is involved.
We also all know that it is possible to win games by pretending to have a strong hand (i.e., bluffing). Classic example: there are three queens in the community cards. Whoever has the other queen (if anyone) wins the pot. So…pretend that you’re the one with the remaining queen by making a large bet. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. If no-one else has the queen, you’ve won. If someone has the queen, you’ve lost, because they will call or raise.
Pretending to have four of a kind or a straight flush is clever bluffing. These are very simplistic examples, of course, but they suffice to make the point.
So there’s clever bluffing, on the one hand, and stupid bluffing on the other. What is stupid bluffing? People who seem to have a strong hand all the time (which we all know is statistically impossible) are stupid bluffers and are found out very quickly. Sure, they win a few games and win thousands of chips - and then ten minutes later, they’re all gone. These are the kinds of people who go all in when all they’ve got is a single jack. The player who wants to win every single poker game is your stupid bluffer.
Wanting to win every single game, combined with failure to understand basic statistics and probability, is why I call it stupid bluffing - it just means low IQ.
“not having enough bluffs in their range” usually refers to not having a balanced range (the set of possible hole cards you might play the same way), and hence your bets provide more reliable information about the strength of your hand than they would if the range you would bet the same way had a more balanced mix if value and bluffs.
On the first part where you have commentators surprised that someone is not folding, even though they don’t have a hand that beats some of the likely bluffs: typically, you want to bet with the strongest and the weakest cards in your range, and call with some that are somewhere in the middle. So your bluffs should usually represent some of the weakest possible hands you might reasonably have. So when you call with a “bluff catcher”, you expect to lose to all of the value parts of the betters range, and to beat all of the bluffs. If your hand doesn’t even beat all of the normal bluffs the opponent might likely bet with, then that rather severely cuts in to the percentage likelihood of your hand being best, and makes calling usually rather questionable without great pot odds.
I think it is not necessary to bluff to be a winning player in most poker settings, and that at the lowest level, it is probably optimal to remove all bluffs from your game, as calling frequencies tend to be high.
That said, I don’t think you can reach a high level of skill at the game without ever bluffing, and I’m not aware of any strong professionals that never bluff (or that even only bluff a very low percentage of the time).
On the question of showing bluffs (or any hands for that matter): I think some people use it effectively to tilt other players, but on the whole, with competent opposition at the table, I prefer never showing my cards (even more so with value bets than with bluffs).
I do think bluffs are a key part of the magic of most variants of poker, and that both knowing when to bluff, and when not to, are important skills in becoming stronger at the game. (Others I’d mention would be bet sizing, betting frequencies, and starting to form better ideas about the ranges opponents are using in different spots).
Tks, Yorunoame, that clears up alot.
Most of the bluffing i encounter is semi-bluffing, and usually easy to recognize.
However, sometimes I start thinking people will do what i might do in certain spots, and have done, successfully, then get caught trying to bust a bluff that isn’t there. My ratio there isn’t very good.
I also show often, so even when I lose, they see I had a great draw or something worth betting. If I’m betting I usually think I have the best hand.