Bluffing Tips?

one of my bigger problems I think is with my bluffing. I can spend a while building a decent stack playing TAG poker but then I lose a good portion of it because of one large bluff. This mainly happens with a few people left in SNGs but it really goes for all poker. Does anybody have a good tips or advice on bluffing? Limit or No Limit.

make your line for the hand make sense to your opponent. If the line looks like a big hand to villian then thats what he will think you have

Play a bluff exactly like how you would play if you had the nuts or close to the nuts.

Tips

1. Dont bluff

2. Never bluff

3. Rarely bluff

Seriously people call a lot. Bluffs rarely work. Most of the time you "bluffed" and it succeeded you didnt bluff.. you had the best hand. Changes are your opponent didnt have the hand he was repping.

Yeah. It doesn't matter what limit is being played, everyone hates folding.

Anyway...I would suggest checking out some articles/threads on cbetting. That is essentially the most basic bluff people execute. The principles you use to figure out what makes a good cbet apply to other bluffs as well. You just have to refine and adjust them.

C-bets are not bluffs!

They collect dead money.

When you cbet, you dont expect to fold out better hands (which is a bluff) and you dont expect to be called by worse (otherwise your flop bet is a value bet)

In order to bluff your opponent must have a hand.. thats why cbets work a lot even though most people call too much.

Cbets often get "better" hands to fold in terms of equity. I cbet the flop after my open w/67s, it's very likely that anything that gets mucked was a "better" hand than mine. Collecting dead money is obviously a big piece of the rationale too, but a bet is either for value or a bluff and I would think cbetting is frequently a bluff.

Not as often as youd think.

People peel a lot of flops.

When you cbet you dont expect to fold out better (you will fold out some better but its actually a much smaller percentage than you think.)

When you c-bet you do so because you think that a large % of your opponents range cannot continue on the board not because you have visions of folding out made hands.

An example might be cbetting an underpair on a drawy board.. most made hands peel. Most FDs are also overcards to your underpair. C-betting an underpair in this case is suicide because so much of the villians range calls and even the draws have more equity than an underpair on the flop... and you wont be barrelling often enough for them to realise that equity by showdown.

Realll cbets are not bluffs they are bets made with the soul intention of taking down dead money. If you know your opponents range and you know how that hits the board you should have an idea of how much dead money there is.

I suppse the easiest example would be this.

You hold 66s
Villian holds KK

Board is A39

If villian folds to a c-bet then that is a bluff. Do you expect KK to fold to a single bet on the flop? What about QQ, JJ, TT,? These are weak made hands on this board and you very rarely get them to fold to a c-bet!

22... 44.. 55 against those hands you are value betting but they probably wont call so your c bet dosent get value from hands you beat.

Hands like KJ with no FD do have some equity and should fold, but you arent bluffing when you fold out a hand you are ahead of!

Varying your play, bets, and style is the only way you can bluff. If your opponent suspects that you have cards and you play the same way each time they will fold. If they think you don't have cards or that they can beat your hand they will call.

End of the day, you have to play against your opponents not necessarily play your cards.

I have to say I agree with Stu on this one. Bluffing is very overrated and used way too much, with poor technique. The best move would be to bluff as less as possible, although cbetting is an effective move.

Thanks for the comments guys. it sounds like i bluff to much so I will cut that down. I also lose alot of money with failed cbets so I will use the texture of the board to determine if I will or not. I basically cbet like 90% of the time no matter what so I get check raised alot.

@stu - I agree with everything you're saying except the part where that all somehow makes c-betting not bluffing. A cbet is very often a thin bluff that is made very profitable because it collects dead money very well.

On your example...what if you raise with 78s from the BTN, got a flat from the blinds and saw that A93 board. It's a great spot to cbet and a huge portion of the hands villain will fold are technically ahead of your 78s. Obviously they're still calling with made hands, but you very rarely fire a bluff hoping to get the top end of their range to fold. Usually you bluff to get some bottom/middle part of their range, that still has you beat, to go away.

I guess the ultimate way to think of it is that you almost never want to see your cbets getting called. That almost certainly classifies the bet as a bluff and not as a value bet.

Regardless, this is mainly an issue of semantics. The main point I was getting at is that the things you use to evaluate profitable c-bet spots are typically used to evaluate profitable bluffing spots as well: board texture, villain's hand range vs. calling range, image, position, etc. All these factor heavily into whether a bluff is going to be +EV. Incidentally, they are the same things you tend to look at when deciding if a c-bet is going to be +EV. Thus, studying cbetting will aid you in developing a sense of when to bluff. Follow up study of two barreling is likely to help a lot too.

A better example would be raising 6-7s preflop , K-J calls, board comes A-3-9 - you c-bet, K-J folds - they are the better hand and you got them to fold it. the C-bet is a bluff, if you missed the flop.

Now, you don't c-bet bluff a draw heavy board that may have hit your opponent.

What I like to do usually is get a reputation of a tight player. I play a lot with my friends for small tournies. And I have built this reputation that I am an extremely tight player because early on in tournies, I like to get a big hand so that once I have gotten a big hand I can double up early. I fold a lot of hands as well, so people don't expect me to bluff and eventually I will bluff and guess what no one calls because they think I am a tight player. I used this later on when I starting playing online poker, I basically would go 50 hands of tight poker and people began to realize that I am a very tight player so it leads to the bluffing for me.

heres a few links. i think they will help...

http://poker.bodog.com/poker-tips/bluffing/

http://ezinearticles.com/?Poker-Bluf...-Tips&id=72048