Finding the Right Bluffing Frequency in Texas Hold Em Poker
How often should you bluff? That's a tough question for poker players that doesn't necessarily have a clear answer.
At the micro-level, the answer is pretty simple: you should bluff when you think it has a good enough chance of working to justify the investment you make when you bluff.
So, if the pot is $1000 and you bluff $500 at it, your bluff needs to be successful more than half the time to be profitable - when you win, you win $1000 and when you lose, you lose $500.
Easy enough.
That's all well and good, but the fact of the matter is that bluffing doesn't happen in a vacuum.
How often you bluff has a really big impact on how likely your opponents are to think you're bluffing again, so you can't just asses each bluff individually.
Instead, you must consider how your history of bluffing (or lack thereof) impacts the ability you have at any given point to make a successful bluff.
This is where things get a bit more delicate.
Bluff too often and you'll find your opponents never giving you credit for a hand, which can be useful if you're planning to lock down for a little bit and only play quality hands.
Bluff too infrequently and players will see your cards as if the hand is face up - you'll never get paid off on your strong hands, because players will never be curious about what you're holding.
They'll just assume you're holding the nuts (or the effective nuts), and if you're not bluffing much, they're right to assume as such.
What you're ultimately looking for, then, is a ratio of bluffing to not bluffing that allows you to occupy the middle ground between the two extremes described above.
A good rule of thumb is that if your bluffs are being picked off more than a third of the time, you're probably bluffing a bit too much and need to pull it in a bit.
If you're getting caught about 1/4th of the time, then you're in great shape.
That's a ratio that ensures your bluffs are still profitable on their own, but means that you're also showing a bluff often enough that players will be prone to suspicion, meaning you'll get value out of your strong hands.
If you're having trouble working bluffing into your game, take note of how many pots you contest during a given session.
If you're a fairly tight player, you probably only play about 10% of hands, and probably only play about half of those aggressively.
Ask yourself - would anyone even suspect or notice if you added a couple of hands to the roster of those you play aggressively? Probably not.
Bluffing still requires you to pick spots that make sense for executing a bluff, and that's a separate article altogether.
Hopefully this article has given you a sense of how to better balance those bluffs so you can achieve an equilibrium that will make it difficult for your opponents to play correctly against you.
At the micro-level, the answer is pretty simple: you should bluff when you think it has a good enough chance of working to justify the investment you make when you bluff.
So, if the pot is $1000 and you bluff $500 at it, your bluff needs to be successful more than half the time to be profitable - when you win, you win $1000 and when you lose, you lose $500.
Easy enough.
That's all well and good, but the fact of the matter is that bluffing doesn't happen in a vacuum.
How often you bluff has a really big impact on how likely your opponents are to think you're bluffing again, so you can't just asses each bluff individually.
Instead, you must consider how your history of bluffing (or lack thereof) impacts the ability you have at any given point to make a successful bluff.
This is where things get a bit more delicate.
Bluff too often and you'll find your opponents never giving you credit for a hand, which can be useful if you're planning to lock down for a little bit and only play quality hands.
Bluff too infrequently and players will see your cards as if the hand is face up - you'll never get paid off on your strong hands, because players will never be curious about what you're holding.
They'll just assume you're holding the nuts (or the effective nuts), and if you're not bluffing much, they're right to assume as such.
What you're ultimately looking for, then, is a ratio of bluffing to not bluffing that allows you to occupy the middle ground between the two extremes described above.
A good rule of thumb is that if your bluffs are being picked off more than a third of the time, you're probably bluffing a bit too much and need to pull it in a bit.
If you're getting caught about 1/4th of the time, then you're in great shape.
That's a ratio that ensures your bluffs are still profitable on their own, but means that you're also showing a bluff often enough that players will be prone to suspicion, meaning you'll get value out of your strong hands.
If you're having trouble working bluffing into your game, take note of how many pots you contest during a given session.
If you're a fairly tight player, you probably only play about 10% of hands, and probably only play about half of those aggressively.
Ask yourself - would anyone even suspect or notice if you added a couple of hands to the roster of those you play aggressively? Probably not.
Bluffing still requires you to pick spots that make sense for executing a bluff, and that's a separate article altogether.
Hopefully this article has given you a sense of how to better balance those bluffs so you can achieve an equilibrium that will make it difficult for your opponents to play correctly against you.
Source...