AKQJ10: I appreciate the feedback. I guess I don’t raise with air often because but I think it is OK if done sparingly against the right opponent with the right stack sizes and board texture. There are just certian times that your opponents hands can’t take the heat so they dump it before making a commitment bet or call. I’m pretty tight and solid. So when I make big bets, I have a big hand 90+% of the time. But this allows me to make some daring straight up bluffs once in a while.

No one was saying this was a ground-breaking article imo

Although I’ve read comments by Ed to the effect that he’ll sometimes make a flop check-raise (or other play) with air, I don’t see the point.

The whole theoretical point of semibluffing is this: if you’re going to make bets and raises that you’d rather not be called, you may as well make them with hands that have some equity if called rather than hands with no equity if called.

In fact, a 9-out HE draw with two cards to come is never close to even money, so I disagree with your classification of such a hand as “having the goods” rather than “bluffing.” Semibluffs are bluffs! Just that they’re bluffs with some equity when called.

So back to the “air”. I can understand why I need to [semi]bluff at a dry flop on occasion to keep an opponent from correctly inferring that aggression on such a flop indicates two pair or better. What I don’t get is what value there is in picking total misses instead of rather weak semibluffing hands. A dry board may not present strong draws by definition, but it represents all sorts of weak draws — backdoor flush and backdoor OES draws, middle and bottom pairs, etc. Why not choose those for our bluffs?

To put it another way, if my range for say C/Ring the flop is [a tiny bit of equity..a monster] rather than [no equity whatsoever..a monster] am I really guilty of a significant informational leak? If my opponent infers, “Hmmm, AKQJ10 must have at least a backdoor flush draw here,” and folds more often as a result, is that really hurting me? I want the fold when I semibluff with 33% equity, let alone 4% or something silly.

Perhaps you and Ed are calling the 4% “air”, in which case it’s just a semantic misunderstanding. Otherwise, I don’t get why you’d choose to make a stone cold bluff before the river.

But VegasSocrates makes a really solid point IMO. Sometimes we do get in the habit of approaching hand histories like chess problems, where every position has a “right” answer. Of course, that’s absolutely not true, whether you want to call it metagame or multi-hand strategy or whatever.

And yes, sometimes a naive but highly intuitive player can outplay a “sophisticated” player lacking that same gut feel for psychology. In fact, knowing that makes me want to get an analog watch (see Harrington I) and start randomizing instead of trying to go by feel — although sometimes I think I could become a good intuitive player too.

For me its reraising all in with air in a limped pot, calling all ins on the turn with a 6 high flush draw, limping with aces then autoshoving a 678 flop……