Default Positioning: Bluffing

by: Lou Krieger©

Default positioning often results in players calling too often while not folding or raising often enough. Although we talked about this last issue, it’s not the whole story. Many players have a default position where bluffing is concerned too. That’s because most people you meet around the table are looking to play their cards rather than throw them in the muck.

The default position for most players is “My opponent is bluffing,” when it really should be, “He bet; I guess he’s got a good hand.”

This is a rather broad, sweeping generality and there are myriad exceptions to the rule. Although we all know poker players who play just about every hand and bluff whenever they don’t have a good one, maniacal players are really in the minority. Anyone who bets or raises most of the time is obviously bluffing more than he’s betting good hands, because over the long haul the bad, unplayable hands you’re dealt are going to far outnumber those that are playable.

But let’s forget about these maniacs for a while. They’re a special case, and easily dealt with. Just raise with your good hands whenever they come out betting. In the long run, selective play on your part is all that’s required to put the odds in your favor whenever they bet and you play back at them with your good hands.

Other players don’t bluff all that much. And even if you don’t have any special intuition that tells you when someone has the goods and when he doesn’t, the community cards on the board and the number of opponents in the pot can help you sort it out.

After all, bluffs are more likely when a scare card — especially one that suggests a straight or a flush — hits the board than when the board is ragged and a the next card that’s dealt doesn’t seem like it improved anyone’s hand.

The more opponents, the less likely it is that the bettor is bluffing. It’s a lot more difficult to get four or five players to fold their hands than one, so a large, family-sized pot is insurance against the likelihood of a bluff in a way that it never can be when a pot is played heads-up.

The converse is usually true too. Many players like to believe, “My bluff will work,” when they probably should be thinking, “My bluff will probably be called.”

Too many players fall into the trap of thinking about what they’d like to see happen, and then talking themselves into believing it. It’s a loose players’ epidemic of major proportions.

It’s usually costly when you run a bluff against long odds. Before you decide to bluff, consider your chances of succeeding, then look at the size of the pot and take the long view of things. If you honestly believe you can bluff successfully bluff in this situation once every seven times, but the pot contains 12 big bets, you’re risking one to win a dozen when the odds against you are only 6-to-1, and that’s a bet you should make. But if the payoff looks to be smaller than your chances of success, bluffing will prove costly in the long run.

The cards on the board and the number of opponents in the pot are critical indicators of your chances to bluff successfully, but it’s also important to know your opponents’ playing styles.

If you’ve got one guy in the hand with you who is the table sheriff, who always calls to keep you honest, don’t even consider bluffing. If you do, you’ve allowed yourself to talk yourself into a choice of tactics that objective analysis would never support: You can’t bluff a compulsive caller.

That’s when it’s time to get off of autopilot and feel the road beneath you, then take the controls and drive it for all it’s worth.