Bluff Cooler

By Andrew Brokos

Bad luck is to poker players what snow is to the eskimos. We have developed an extensive vocabulary for expressing subtle differences in the ways that we believe the universe to have wronged us. Sadly, I have participated in detailed discussions of the precise definitions of “bad beat”, “suck-out”, “cooler”, “set-up”, etc. This month, I would like to introduce a new term to the poker players’ bad luck lexicon: “bluff-cooler”.

At least as I use the term, a “cooler” refers to a situation where two players both have hands strong enough to warrant putting a lot of money into the pot. For example, if I have pocket Kings and get all of my money in pre-flop against your pocket Aces, I can generally attribute the loss of my stack to bad luck rather than bad play. As long as I am correct that you would have put your money in with at least a few hands worse than my Kings, then I simply “got coolered” and can chalk the loss up to bad luck. To put it slightly more precisely, I would say that a “cooler” is when a hand in your value range runs into a slightly better hand in your opponent’s value range.

A “bluff cooler” would mean that a hand in your bluffing range runs into a hand in your opponent’s bluff-catching range. In other words, you have a hand that is very good for bluffing, you execute what you believe will be a profitable bluff against a significant part of your opponent’s range, and he calls you down with a hand that you were never expecting him to fold.

This highlights an important point: you should usually have a bluffing range. Most exceptions to this rule are opponent-specific, so unless you are attempting to exploit a particular player’s overly loose tendencies, you should generally be capable of betting as a bluff or semi-bluff in any situation where you would bet for value.

The bluff cooler is an important concept when it comes to evaluating your play after the fact. As much as we know it’s wrong, results-oriented thinking can be extremely seductive. Whenever one of your bluffs does not succeed, it can be tempting to deem it a mistake, criticize yourself, and resolve not to bluff in such a situation again.

If your initial assumptions were correct, however, then this thinking may be just as irrational as deciding to fold Kings the next time because you ran into Aces this time. Understanding the concept of a bluff cooler helps you to determine whether your bluff was actually misguided or whether you were simply unlucky to run into one of the best hands your opponent could have.

A Turn Example

You are playing in a NLHE tournament with blinds of 50/100. You are dealt A [heart] Q [spade] in middle position and raise to 250. Everyone folds except the player in the Big Blind, who calls. After raising, you have 1500 chips remaining in your stack, and your opponent covers you.

The flop comes 6 [heart] 8 [club] J [heart]. Your opponent checks, you make a continuation bet of 350 into a pot of 550, and your opponent calls. Knowing nothing about him, you cannot narrow his range down very much. He could have a pair of 6’s, a pair of 8’s, a pair of J’s, a set, a pocket pair of any strength, a heart draw, or an open-ended straight draw with T9 or 97.

The turn is the K [heart]. Your opponent checks. Having just picked up the nut flush draw and a gutshot straight draw, you are tempted to bluff again. There is now 1250 in the pot and 1150 in your stack, so if you bet, you might as well go all-in.

Given that you know very little about how wide your opponent is calling you on the flop or what he’ll be willing to fold if you move all-in on the turn, you should seek to balance your range for moving all-in on the turn. In others, you should make this play with a value range of very strong hands like sets and flushes and with a bluffing range consisting of strong draws that do not figure to be ahead if called but that have a good chance of improving to the best hand.

This way, no matter what your opponent does, he won’t be able to exploit you. If he calls with even weak pairs, then he will sometimes be drawing dead against your strongest hands and other times be only slightly ahead of your semi-bluffs. If he folds all but his strongest hands, you won’t win as much with your big hands, but your semi-bluffs will succeed more often.

Figuring out the exact range of hands with which it would be optimal to move all-in here is too complicated an operation to perform at the table. Thankfully, in a case like this, it isn’t necessary. Generally, when you are moving all-in before the river, unexploitable play entails betting with your strongest made hands and your strongest draws.

Does your A [heart] Q [spade] fall into one of these categories? You don’t expect to be ahead right now, so it wouldn’t count as a strong made hand, but it sure looks like a strong draw. No matter what your opponent calls you with, you are guaranteed to have at least seven outs, against the worst-case scenario of a made flush, and you could have as many as seventeen outs if your opponent called you with something really weak like 9 [spade] 8 [spade]. I can’t think of any holding that would would produce a stronger draw than this, so A [heart] Q [spade] is a hand that you ought to bluff with here, making this the top of your bluffing range.

Coolers and Bluff Coolers

Suppose for a moment that instead of A [heart] Q [spade] you held K [heart] K [spade]. With top set and a heart to serve as a redraw, this hand is not quite the very top of your value range- that would be a high flush- but it’s right up there and clearly good enough to get it all-in on the turn.

So, you bet all-in with your set of Kings, and your opponent calls you with the nut flush. You have ten outs to make quads or a full house on the river, but you don’t get there. Does this mean your shove was a mistake?

Hopefully you realize it does not. Presumably your opponent’s range for calling a pot-sized all-in on the turn is much wider than just flushes. It was simply unlucky (for you) that you held such a strong hand when he held an even stronger one. Getting your money in bad was the result of bad luck, not bad play.

The same is true if you move all-in with A [heart] Q [spade] and get called by a flush. When the top of your bluffing range runs into the top of his value range, money is going to change hands, and it doesn’t mean that you did anything wrong.

A River Example

Recognizing hands that belong in your river bluffing range is more difficult, because there is no such thing as a draw on the river. Generally, the best hands to bluff with are those that have the lowest chance of winning at showdown. Consider this example:

You are playing $5/$10 NLHE and are dealt 9 [club] 8 [club] on the Button. The player on your right opens with a raise to $30. You don’t know much about how he plays, but you both have stacks of $2000. Even against an unknown opponent, you believe you can play a suited connector profitably with position and such deep stacks, so you call.

The blinds fold, and the flop comes J [club] 7 [heart] 2 [heart], giving you a gutshot and a backdoor flush draw. Your opponent bets $50, and you call as a float. That is, you think he is often just making a continuation bet and will check and give up on the turn. If he doesn’t, you have some chance of improving your hand.

The turn is the 5 [club], and your opponent bets $150. The bad news is that you didn’t hit your straight and he didn’t give up. The good news is that you picked up a second gutshot draw and a flush draw. If he has the pair of Jacks or better that he’s representing, you don’t have the immediate odds to call. However, your draws are all reasonably well concealed, so you should be able to count on winning a big bet and maybe even his stack if you get there. Even if you miss, there may be some options available to you, as we’ll soon see…

You call, and the river is the A [heart]. Given that you know nothing about your opponent, you have no idea what to make of his check. Perhaps he was bluffing and is now giving up. Perhaps he was value betting but now plans to check-fold because the heart draw got there. Those would be arguments for bluffing.

Then again, he could be planning on calling with a non-flush hand that he was value betting on the previous streets. He could even be going for an ultra-tricky river check-raise with a flush of his own. You have no way of knowing, so as in the previous example, you should try to balance your range for betting the river.

Presumably you will sometimes have rivered a flush and will want to bet it for value. To prevent your opponent from exploiting your value bets by check-folding all of his non-flush hands, you must also sometimes bluff this river. The question is, of all the hands that you would play this way, which are the best to bet as a bluff?

If you think about it, almost any hand that you’d play this way would have some showdown value. The only obvious draw on the flop got there, so you will almost always have at least one pair on this river after calling big bets on the flop and turn. It was only through a combination of a speculative flop call and a very specific turn card that you managed to get to the river with just 9-high.

The next worst hand you could show up with on this river is probably something like 87 for a pair of 7’s. Even that hand would at least be able to win at showdown against the part of your opponent’s range that was bluffing and is now giving up. That doesn’t necessarily mean that you shouldn’t bluff with it, but compared to bluffing with the 9-high that you have here, bluffing with a pair of 7’s would be slightly less profitable.

This is because you must compare the Expected Value (EV) of a bluff against the EV of a check. Presumably a bluff of the same size would succeed with the same frequency whether you made it with 98 or 87. However, the EV of checking with 87 is higher than checking with 98, because the pair will sometimes win at showdown, whereas the 9-high will usually lose even to hands that your opponent thought he was bluffing.

Thus, you might consider bluffing with 87, but you should definitely bluff with 98. You will never have less showdown value than you do right now, so it’s the perfect time to try to represent a flush.

You bet $400, and your opponent thinks for a moment before calling with pocket Aces for a rivered set. It’s hard to fault him for that call, since a set of Aces is probably one of the best hands he’ll ever check on this river. You might even be capable of betting two-pair or a lower set for thin value.

You shouldn’t fault yourself for the bluff, either. In most cases, you should have a bluffing range, and as we saw, this is about the best hand you could have for bluffing. A hand that clearly belongs in your bluffing range ran into a hand that clearly belongs in his bluff-catching range. Money changed hands, but no one played badly. It was just a bluff cooler.

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