Fundamentals of Bluffing Part II

In this situation you have a gutshot straight draw and a flush draw which gives you 12 outs (9 flush cards and three 5s). If you assumed your opponent had a weak ace or a high pocket pair and they might fold to a bet, then it would be extremely profitable to semi-bluff at the pot.

The reason for this is two fold: firstly because the small % of the time they fold the best hand you gain money and secondly, even if they call your bet you have a strong chance of hitting one of your draws on the turn. To calculate our MSR for semi-bluffing we need to know two things:

a) The probability of hitting our draw

And

b) The maximum probability of failure for our bet size.

To find out the probability of hitting a draw we can use Pokerstove or to get a rough estimate count the number of out you have and multiply by 2. So if we decide to semi-bluff with a flush draw we will have around a 19% to make our hand on the next card.

To calculate our maximum probability of failure we need to know our minimum success rate on a pure bluff for our specific bet size (i.e. for a pot sized bluff our MSR was 50%). We then need to subtract our MSR% from 100% and this gives us our max failure rate (MFR). So if we are semi-bluffing with a pot sized bet our MFR would be 50% (100% - 50% = 50%)

If we take our pure bluffing result and add it to our semi-bluffing results we get the following equation:

50% (from last equation) – (19.5% * 50%) = 40.43%

Therefore, if we decide to pot bet semi-bluff our flush draw on the flop we will need our opponent to fold more than 40% of the time to be successful. The important point to draw from this is that when you have the power of a draw behind your bluff you have a much greater chance of making a profit.

This is because you need to make your opponent fold a smaller % of the time to be profitable.

Logical reasoning would assume that if you have two ways to win the pot, i.e. taking it down without the best hand and being able to make a wining hand if your initial bluff initially, then you have a much better chance of making money.

Hopefully, those equations have demonstrated that the process of bluffing is not just a simple case of “feeling” it’s the right thing to do. There is a definite science behind profitably bluffing your opponents.

I did mention, however, that bluffing is two parts science and one part art and even though you know the type of fold rates you need from your opponents to be successful you still need to KNOW your opponents. This is where you own observations and intuitions come into play because not only do you need to know your opponents tendencies but you also must understand your own image.

If you’re playing against a table of fishy, maniacs who’d sooner stick pins in their eyes than fold then this obviously isn’t going to be a good time to start testing out your bluffing techniques.

Lets assume we are playing a fishy player who never folds a pair or draw. We raise it up with K-Q and loosey goosey calls us. The flop lands: 4, 6, T. and we fire out a continuation bet which is called by our opponent. At this point we have to assume he either has a pair or a draw because we know he’ll never fold these.

The turn comes an 8 and now we have to decide whether to bluff again. In this spot if we were going to bet 50% of the pot we’d need our opponent to fold around 33% of the time (see the previous equations above). We know, however, that this opponent can’t bear to fold any pairs or draws and so the likelihood they’ll fold more than 33% of the time is very slim.

Thus, even if we know our opponent only has bottom pair we need to remind ourselves he hardly ever folds and that mathematically we are losing money if we continue to bluff.

Now let’s take the same scenario against a tight player. This player will only call with very strong hands. In this situation the profitability of bluffing on the turn is greater because unless our opponent has a hand such as Ace Ten, or a large pocket pair, they’re likely to think that their middle pair is beaten and therefore fold.

From this we can see that it is much more profitable to bluff against the tight players because their folding frequencies are going to much greater and closer to the MSR numbers we’ve calculated. In addition to knowing our opponents we need to know ourselves.

If we’ve been playing very tight then it’s much more likely that our opponents will think we’re a rock and that we only bet with strong hands. Thus, our chances of making a successful bluff are much greater.

If, on the other hand, we’ve been raising havoc at the table for the past hour it’s safe to assume that our opponents are going to read us as a manic and not believe our bluffs. Balancing these two aspects is crucial and gaining a strong insight into your opponents is part of the art of poker and something that only comes with practice.

In a nutshell, bluffing is all about picking the right spots and knowing how often you’re going to be successful. It stands to reason that bluffing in position is going to be far more profitable than out of position and bluffing against a tight player will be the most successful.

Knowing the mathematics behind bluffing isn’t essential but if you can spend some time getting a feel for the percentages you stand a much better chance of making correct decisions at the table.