by Andrew Brokos
Originally published in the July 2008 issue of 2+2 Magazine
Poker players hate getting bluffed. Of course, getting bluffed means you made a mistake, and no one likes making mistakes. But it’s more than that: many players hate the idea of getting bluffed. They take a bluff as an insult, an affront to their ego, and are much more bothered by getting bluffed than they are by making a bad bet, call, or check that costs them the same amount of equity as a bad fold.
This is irrational behavior, and part of the solution is simply to think differently about what it means to get bluffed and what a bluff really costs you. But you can also improve your game by thinking holistically about your strategy and how it could be exploited by bluffing.
How Bluffs Hurt You
It might seem obvious that bluffs hurt you by costing you a pot that you would have won. Except that it isn’t that simple.
Suppose that you hold QJo on a J [club] 8 [club] 7 [heart] flop. Your opponent bets $6 into an $8 pot, you raise to $20, and he moves all in for $100. After much thought, you fold, and he flashes A [club] 6 [club] as he stacks your chips. You got bluffed, but it didn’t cost you the entire pot. Calling would have cost you $80 for a 53% chance of winning a $208 pot, for a profit of about $31.25. The bluff cost you $31.25, nowhere near the entire $128 pot.
But that’s not the whole story either, because unless you detected a tell, you had no way of knowing that your opponent had a flush draw until he turned over his cards. He may very well have played sets, overpairs, and better top pair hands in exactly the same way. Against a range of {JJ+,88-77,AJs,Ac6c,KJs,QJs,JTs,AJo,KJo,QJo,JTo}, your QJ has less than 27% equity, meaning that your fold actually saved you almost $25.
Note that this is the case even on the river. When you think about the entire range of hands your opponent might bet with, rather than just the two cards he shows you after you muck, you realize that folding to the occasional bluff doesn’t cost you the entire pot. In fact, it may even save you money.
Thus, if you want to be a winning player, you have to accept that allowing yourself to get bluffed some of the time is a necessity. If you never fold, you’ll never fold a winner, but you’ll never be a winner either. The trick is not to stop your opponent from bluffing entirely but rather to avoid situations where you will be bluffed excessively or where the threat of a bluff leads you to play poorly.
Bad Defenses
The most obvious defense against bluffing is to call. This works against opponents who bluff too often, but it is incredibly simple to exploit. All your opponent has to do is stop bluffing, and suddenly you are the sucker.
Calling is an especially poor defense if you haven’t yet gotten to the river, because you may end up facing more bets on future streets. That is, even if you correctly call a bluff on the flop, you may get bluffed out on the turn or river. Or, your opponent might make a hand and then get you to pay off a value bet. Even if the bluff doesn’t win the pot immediately, it still might help your opponent by putting you in a bad spot later in the hand.
Another relatively poor defense is a pre-emptive or blocking bet, where you make a small bet in the hopes of preventing your opponent from making a large one. This, too, is easily exploitable. An opponent who recognizes your blocking bet for what it is can raise you as a bluff. Since he will also be raising most of his better hands, there isn’t much you can do, so now the bluff has cost you an additional bet.
Even if it doesn’t open you up to a bigger bluff, your blocking bet will usually cost you the amount of the bet. In other words, it will only be called by better hands. That might be less expensive than getting bluffed, but wouldn’t you rather find a cheaper and more effective defense against bluffing?
Mixing Up Your Range
To discover the true cost of a fold, you have to consider your opponent’s entire range. The next step in building up a defense against is to think about your entire range. Your opponent doesn’t know that you have a weak top pair. He has to make his decisions in light of a range of hands you could hold, just as you must do against him. Ask yourself where your current holding fits into your range. Is it one of the strongest hands that you would play this way, or one of the weakest? It’s OK to get bluffed off of the weakest hands in your range. Your consolation comes when you play a stronger hand the same way, your opponent makes the same bluff, and you snap him off.
Think back to the example above, where you are considering calling all in with QJ on a J [club] 8 [club] 7 [heart] flop. Look at it from your opponent’s perspective. Does he have any reason to think you are going to fold? Unless he knows you to be an inveterate slowplayer, he has to consider it possible for you to hold a straight, two pair, a set, or an overpair. QJ is probably one of the weakest hands you could have. That means that folding QJ will not be exploitable. If your opponent is making this all in play often without a solid hand, he’s going to pay for it, because this raise from you will very often mean that you have a strong holding that will happily call an all in.
Consider another situation where many players let their fear of bluffing get in the way of good play. The button opens for a pot-sized raise of $7, you make a pot-sized re-raise to $23 with KK in the SB, and he calls. “Every time,” you sigh to yourself as the flop comes an ugly A Q 9.
Some players will go ahead and bet here, even though they don’t expect better hands to fold or worse hands to call, simply because they are afraid that if they check, they will invite a series of bluffs that they cannot call.
This might seem like a no-win situation, and in some ways it is. You probably aren’t going to win a big pot when you 3-bet with KK and an Ace flops.
In another way, you are asking the wrong question. The problem here is not, “How am I going to play KK in a 3-bet pot when an Ace flops?” Instead, you should think about, “How am I going to play my entire range in a 3-bet pot when an Ace flops?” The question of what to do with KK is just one part of this bigger problem, and when you consider your strategy as a whole, you’ll have more tools for handling this specific situation.
Let’s say that your range for 3-betting here is something like AT+, TT+, and occasional weaker hands such as suited connectors. You need to devise a profitable, balanced way to play each of these hands.
Since you are first to act on the flop, your options are to bet, check and call a bet, or check and fold. When you have nothing, as with a suited connector that missed the flop, you’ll want to bet to represent the Ace and win on a bluff. That means that you’ll have to bet with some strong hands as well, so that your bluffs will have credibility. AK, AQ, and QQ are all strong enough to stand up to considerable heat on this flop, so those are good candidates for betting as well. Betting with those hands both builds a pot and protects your bluffs.
AA is a very strong hand also, of course, but maybe a little too strong. When you’re looking at three of the Aces, it’s very unlikely that your opponent will have a hand that can give you action on this flop, so perhaps you choose to check top set as a slowplay.
What other hands will you check? AT, AJ, and KK are still strong hands, but if you bet with them, you may not get action from worse. So these are good candidates for checking and trying to induce a bluff. Your opponent is not going to bluff unless you are also checking weaker hands, though, so let’s also check TT and JJ with the intention of folding to a bet. With two overcards on the board, these hands aren’t worth much anymore. The best you can hope for is to check and show them down cheaply.
So far so good, but another problem arises: you check and call a bet with KK on the flop, because it is in the middle of your range. That is, you are checking and folding weaker hands like TT and JJ, so you can afford to check and call one bet with KK. But what are you going to do on the turn? Now KK is the weakest hand in your range, so if your opponent bets again, you can fold. He might be bluffing, but if he is, he’ll regret it the times than you check and call again with AT and AJ, or when you check-raise him on the turn with AA.
Notice how a strategy like this not only protects your weak hands but gets you action with your strong hands as well. When you have nothing, you bet as a bluff. But your opponent can’t exploit this by calling or raising with nothing because you are also betting with very strong hands. You check with KK with the intention of giving up eventually, but your opponent can’t exploit that with a multi-street bluff because sometimes when you check you will have top pair or even top set and call him down or raise him.
Conclusion
The important thing here is not to learn the details of this particular strategy for playing in 3-bet pots. Rather, you should pay attention to how this strategy was constructed, how it is balanced, and how it protects you from exploitation by bluffs. You may still find yourself getting bluffed, but you can take consolation in the knowledge that it isn’t costing you much, if anything. And next time, you’ll have a good hand that will wipe that smirk of your bluff-happy opponent’s face.