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Top Strategies When It Comes to Bluffing
Bluffing—play it right, and you could win the game. Play it wrong, and you'll lose everything. See the difference? If you're going to do the latter, you will practically, automatically, lose majority of what you have. Worse, you can sometimes be stripped off your dignity, knowing that someone was able to counter your bluffs big time.
Novice players are usually guilty of this. Usually, they know what bluffing is about, but they really don't have any idea how to do it exquisitely that even the more advanced players would not be feeling or smelling it under their noses. So what are the best strategies when it comes to bluffing? Read on:
1. Know that there can be a lot of kinds of bluffs. You know what they say: for you to beat the enemy, you have to know who they are. You should be able to know their usual defenses, and there could be quite of them. One of the common types of bluff is what we call the semi-bluff. This usually happens when a player is already on a draw. Normally, you would know if he's in semi-bluff if he decides to go all-in with his bet. This means that everything he has—chips and money—is already in the pot.
To give you an example, a player may already have a royal hot flush, but is definitely lacking 10. To force the rest of the players to fold, he's going to go all-in. The best counterattack for this one is to reraise, which simply means you're going to raise another previous person's raise. That will definitely force him to fold. You also have the stone cold bluff, which is very powerful that it can actually causes someone to tilt. It is simply making a large bet on nothing, so this is very dangerous if you're not going to do it pretty well. The person who is considered to be doing this kind of bluff is normally the one in the last position in the table. You will also know that there is a stone cold bluff if there are no raises or big bets prior to the largest bet that has been given.
2. Avoid small raises and calls. Keep in mind that what you're trying to do is to at least scare your opponents that they will eventually fold. Thus, your bluff should be able to make a difference, and you're not going to do that if you only settle for calls. If you do raises, you're only giving the small ones. You're just going to be wasting money, and worse, those who know that you're only bluffing are going to eat you alive. They may even make a call on you, and you would have to spend more from your bankroll.
3. Don't settle for one bluffing technique. The nice thing about bluffing is that it can be very flexible. If you cannot beat the other players in online poker through raises and re-raises, you can surely try to apply mind games into them. Send them chat messages, but make sure that you don't sound too cocky with your approach. You're just trying to intimidate them, not really press the button and cause an argument in the middle of a game.
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