Bluffing your bad hands

No Limit Holdem / Marcus Bateman / 13 January 2010 / Leave a Comment

One of the key mistakes you see some of even the best players make is to start bluffing with marginal hands. This is particularly noticeable in limit hold'em, where you will frequently see players bluffing parts of their ranges which they really should be trying to get to showdown.

In terms of a pure game theory perspective, this concept is relatively easy to demonstrate with David Sklansky's Ace, Queen, and King game. The game is simple. You either get dealt an ace, a king or a queen, and your opponent always checks to you. Which hands should you bet?

Clearly you should always bet the ace - at worst you will be chopping against another ace. The king however is much more problematic, as your opponent will nearly always fold a queen, may occasionally call a king, and will always call with an ace. In this spot it is is wise to usually check, as you king has show down value against two of the three hands (beating the queen and chopping against the king), but betting value against only one.

However, to get paid on your aces a significant enough amount, you have to bluff one of the hands, and in this game the best hand to bluff is the queen. As it has no showdown value at all against the ace and king, and can just chop against the single queen, it is the only hand that should be bluffed consistently with, as it is not only the only way to win with that hand, but also the best hand to set up future value bets from the ace with.

The moral of all of this is that the best hands to bluff with in poker are the ones with zero showdown value. Any hand that could be conceivably ahead of your opponent's range should be treated as a hand that you want to try and get shown down. Pulling off big bluffs with these hands is dangerous in the long run, as it unbalances the best actions with your possible range of hands, and this in turn makes you exploitable by an astute opponent.

This can be quite a difficult concept to get your head around at first, but one that is critical to becoming a very good player. Poker is a game of balancing your actions in line with your range(s) of hands, and by bluffing hands with showdown value you unbalance your game and make your actions much easier to dissect in the long run. As you start bluffing with the wrong group of hands, you end up having to give up with your very weak hands too much, while losing unnecessarily big pots with your marginal ones - which is clearly a bad result in the long run.

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