Big poker strategy leaks: bluffing

Frequent bluffing can be one of the biggest leaks in your game. You may be one of the frequent bluffers and not even know it, and it may be eating away at your otherwise perfect game undetected. Experienced players will often have problems with their bluffs, and rookies are almost guaranteed to grossly overestimate the potential and thus the proper frequency of bluffing.
Just because Hollywood movies insist on depicting successful poker as an endless streak of bluffs, it doesn’t mean it’s like that. Please remember that the same movies will not shy away from having a player’s Quads bested by another player’s straight flush and that in turn topped by the main character’s Royal flush. Firing out blind bluffs mindlessly will work just about as often as the above depicted scenario comes about.

Anyway, by now you got the idea: abusing the bluff is not a good move, and hoping that your opponents are dumb enough to fold to your bluffs just because you’d like them to be that dumb is not going to work either.
Does that mean that successful poker players never bluff then? By no means. Good players bluff pretty much all the time, but they almost never run a completely blind bluff, unless the circumstances force them to (I’m thinking the late stages of a MTT here). Bluffing comes in various shapes and sizes, and in order to become a good bluffer you need to learn and to master all the different variants.
Take the quick bluff for instance. The quick bluff is the most frequently used bluff in poker. Even if you’re a beginner, chances are you’ve already used the quick bluff yourself. Quick bluffs are small-ball bluffs. The expected rate of success is excellent and the amount of chips risked through these bluffs is minimal.
The best way to understand the quick bluff is through an example. Let’s consider the following situation. You’re sitting on the button and three other players check a flop of 6,6,2 around to you. In this situation you need to take a whack at the pot, regardless of what you’re holding. You just have to. Because the amount of money involved in the pot is not yet significant at this stage and because taking a risk on a bluff catcher is not really worth it either, the possibility that the other players will give the pot up to you is good. That one there is a classic quick bluff. Even if someone busts your quick bluff, you won’t lose many chips on this one.
The semi bluff is another frequent type of bluff. As a matter of fact, it has become so popular lately that almost every players semi bluffs on just about any 4-card flush he picks up.

A semi-bluff is a lot less hazardous than a straight one. It offers the bluffer two ways to win. Suppose you have a 4-card flush on the flop and you fire out a semi bluff. Your first objective is always to make the other players fold and to force them to give the pot up without a fight. Of course, your intimidation techniques may not work, in which case you’re going to need a backup plan. In this case, the backup plan is to hit your flush on the turn or the river and thus to win the pot fair and square. As you can see, a semi-bluff is nowhere near the dark tunnel, rookie bluff that’s so good at sucking your bankroll dry.

Straight bluffs (or pure bluffs as they’re also known) are not blind bluffs either. Take the c-bet for instance. The c-bet is a popular way to assert ownership of a pot which people are reluctant to lay claim to, by taking advantage of the psychological capital built up via a preflop raise. The player who made a preflop raise sees an opportunity and fires out a second bet past the flop to let the other players know that he still likes his hand and that he’d like to play for more money. There’s absolutely nothing blind about this move though. In order for it to make sense, several circumstances have to click. The player’s poker skills are called upon to spot the right circumstances and to take advantage of them.
Floating is another type of pure bluff, which is probably the most efficient weapon against the c-bet (it is only fair that one pure bluff be kept in check by another). When a player floats, he calls the c-bettor’s second bet and goes to see the turn with him. If the c-bettor hesitates, the floater swings into action and fires out his bluff to make him fold.

Even though it is considered one of the purest forms of bluffs, not even floating means that you have to hold rags to pull it off. On the contrary, experts recommend that you should have at least a weak drawing hand to make the most of your floating, something like a gutshot straight draw for instance.
As you can see, none of the bluffs are stone cold ones. You will often see professional players pull off huge stone cold bluffs against one another, but that doesn’t mean such moves suit you too.
Just try to keep things simple and if you do decide to fire a bluff out every now and then, make sure the circumstances click, the odds are right and that your hand has at least a remote chance to improve radically.