Bluffing And Moving Up

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In my last article, I discussed how the relative strength of your hand reading skills versus your opponents’ can help determine whether you’re ready to move up to higher stakes games. The river betting round is the one that allows you to benefit most from sharp hand reading, so it’s a good place to start when assessing your play.

The last article discussed river value betting decisions. This article discusses the other side of the coin — river bluffing decisions.

If you’re reading hands well, often you’ll have a good idea of whether your opponent’s hand range is dominated by strong hands or weak ones. As you play, do you actively attack your opponent’s weak hand ranges, and do you attack your opponents better than they attack you?

Using The River Card To Bluff

Most no-limit players, bad and good, bluff with some regularity. Bad players tend to bluff using a simple strategy, sometimes as simple as, “If you check the river, I’ll bet every time.” Better players allow their hand reading skills to inform their bluffing.

The first bluffing skill is to use river scare cards to make more successful bluffs. If a river card will have damaged the strength of many of your opponent’s hands, it may be a good time to try a bluff. But a scare card isn’t just any old card that may look scary. For instance, say your opponent checks and calls out of position on the flop and turn. The river brings the third flush card, and your opponent checks again. This is often not a good bluffing card, because of all the hands your opponent would have checked and called with on the flop and turn, a significant percentage of them will have been flush draws.

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