Moving Up: Beyond Winrate And Bankroll – Part 3: River Bluffing
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In Part 2 of Moving Up: Beyond Winrate And Bankroll, I discussed how the relative strength of your hand reading skills versus your opponents’ is a big factor in whether you’re ready to move up or not. The river betting round is the one that allows you to benefit most from sharp hand reading, so it’s a good place to examine when assessing your play.
Part 2 discussed river value betting decisions. This part talks about 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 do it better than your opponents?
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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Tags: 1-2-no-limit, bankroll, bluff catching, bluffing, comfort level, Hunter Bick, moving-up, no-limit-holdem, poker, snapping off bluffs, stoxpoker
I like this series Ed. It fits in very well with your “When do I know I’m awesome” article.
There are no cookbook formulas, like “win rate” in poker for example, that tell you if you really know a subject. That knowledge, as you point out, has to come from within.
This is true not just for poker but probably for everything that is worth doing. I know this because I reached this point at my job. There is one job at my workplace that requires some real mathematics; I mean linear algebra and vector calculus. Even engineers tend to shy away from that level of mathematics.
I decided to step up and try it. At first it was difficult and confusing, but after a while the understanding comes; little by little, first one thing, then another, then another…
Then there came a time when I knew I was Awesome!
It’s a good bit of work to get there, but it’s definitely worth it.