3 Bluffs That Always Work In Poker

06 Feb 2025

Intermediate

This material is for medium-skilled players

James «SplitSuit» Sweeney is a renowned coach, author, and active live and online midstakes player who has been playing successfully for almost two decades. During that time, he has gained a wealth of experience in the game, observing his opponents, and what techniques allow him to consistently beat them without much difficulty. And today he will tell you about 3 bluffing techniques that, in his opinion, are the most reliable. Below - in his words.

If you paid attention to the title of this article, then you probably were wary - bluffs that always work?! Okay, okay, that was hyperbole. No bluff will work 100% of the time, and it does not need that much. But the 3 bluffing techniques that I will tell you about today certainly work great, and certainly, much more often than they should work in theory. In fact, they print money for you. Having learned and gotten used to using them, you will make a lot of money before your opponents can capitalize on that.

The bluffs you will learn about have proven themselves over many years of my play and there is no doubt that they will print profit for us in the future. This happens because no one is born with a solver mindset, but just the opposite - players have always made mistakes, are making mistakes and will make mistakes against bluffs and playing in unpleasant situations. Moreover, this will work not only at the lowest limits, but also against quite competent opponents at medium stakes. Well, let's get started.

This one is the simplest and cheapest of all. Every self-respecting aggressive player should have it in their preflop arsenal, because getting into position is not always enough to play many hands profitably. And 3-bet makes playing many hands, even trash ones, several times more profitable than the other two options. Let's start with a simple example.

• 6-max online cash game. The player in EP opens to 2.5 bb, MP folds, and you decide to 3-bet him to 8 bb in CO with .

The reason these bluff 3-bets work so effectively in terms of money is that

The vast majority of players 4-bet very narrowly and are far from being at a level that would effectively punish you for 3-betting more often - even when they know full well that you can't have a monster like QQ+ there every time.

Therefore, in response to an abundance of bluff 3-bets on the preflop, you will mostly be folded or (less often) called - with a fairly representative range of hands. You can not be afraid of bluff 4-bets as a response exploit at all - this will happen too rarely relative to the proper value, and when you are 4-bet, then there will simply be a strong range with a bunch of preflop nuts (where the weakest hand will often be AK).

If you can find such situations and such opponents in which they will have an overfold of at least 5% of the optimal value (and usually it will be 10-15-20% more), then you should literally force yourself and 3-bet opponents through force and unfamiliarity. Remember that we are talking here about bluff 3-bets being in position, and not out of it - the OOP will be the opponent. And most would rather overfold than fight with an unknown range and be in bad conditions, acting first on the postflop and every now and then receiving unpleasant bets from you.

If an opponent was in position instead of you, then your 3-bet frequency would be different, and the range filling would be different from what you 3-bet in position.

A number of warnings

• Don't bluff fish!

Try to bluff fish as little as possible, even if they are out of position and it is still a pretty cheap spot. Fish are simply less likely to fold by nature - they are always curious to see the flop, and often neither your 3-bet nor their playing out of position under pressure stop them often enough to bring a good profit.

But even if you 3-bet a fish with a bluff, it will not be a disaster: you will still have position, initiative and pressure on the postflop, as well as some fold equity - after all, the fish saw an re-raise behind its open. And here we move on to the second piece of advice:

Therefore, for bluff-3-bets IP against opponents who do not fold too often speculative hands work very well. Examples:

• Suited aces (, etc.),
• Suited kings (, etc.), and also
• Suited broadways in general - they have both playability and kickers to dominate the fish at showdown.

What do these hands have in common? - Excellent playability in position on the postflop, the presence of good blockers on the opponent's continuation range, as well as excellent board coverage and hitting many nut hands.

Therefore, when the opponent does not fold to a 3-bet, then you still have good equity and a much more promising hand, with which it is convenient to bluff than if it was a 3-bet on complete garbage without blockers like J4o or similar.

Now let's summarize this point.

Your main clients for bluff-3-bets preflop are nits and weak tight players who do not know much in poker, except to wait for their hand and only then start to build the bank with it. Preflop, they tend to filter too many hands in advance, and if they get 3-bet, they will be extremely selective in choosing a hand to continue the game and go postflop, especially being left out of position.

• With these opponents, fold equity will almost always be peak on the preflop, and therefore you should bluff them with your hand as often as possible.

A $2/$5 live game. Picture this:

You're in a situation where the flop is , there's $40 in the pot, and you have . You make a standard c-bet of around 1/3 pot, $15 into a $40 pot, which your opponent calls. On the  turn (which is total blank), you make a pot-sized bet of $70 into a $70 pot.

Why does this betting combination work so well?

First, your opponent will call with a much wider range of hands in response to a small c-bet than if the c-bet was bigger. And as the game progresses, this small flop c-bet becomes more common, so does the standard reaction of most opponents - to call wide on the flop, and then, as they say, «we'll sort it out.»

By the way, in the future, the standard flop continuation bet size may well decrease to, for example, 1/4 of the pot, which will entail an even greater expansion of the opponents' calling range on the flop.

So when opponent just calls against this small bet, they almost always say that they are capped on strong hands (two pairs+) which would like to build a pot immediately without delay and foreplay.

That is, the backbone of the opponent's calling range against a small c-bet consists mostly of single-pair hands and draws (and some ), which rarely want to get under a big pressure on the turn and/or river. Especially when they run into a potbet on the turn, playing out of position and not understanding what awaits them on the upcoming river.

A minute of math

Now let's touch on the mathematical basis for why this betting combination works so well. My book on postflop has many interesting formulas and calculations. One of them is right in front of you today.

When we bet 100% of the pot, we need the opponent to fold exactly 50% of combinations from the range that was before our bet. When the opponent folds more often, we get an auto-profit in the long run. Specifically, in this example, we also have an «incentive» to bluff - zero showdown value of the hand, since we are now sitting with T-high.

Therefore, systematic training in Flopzilla PRO in order to find auto-profitable situations at the table will be a very profitable investment of time and effort. And in my next example of working in Flopzilla PRO, I want to show you on numbers and combos - how much, what and why. So let's open Flopzilla PRO and analyze the hand.

Here I have already entered this spot: approximate range on the preflop, => then on the flop => and then the initial range of the opponent on the turn. Through the enabled (green) filter, I recorded in the program the range of the opponent's call that I expected after my continuation bet for ~ 1/3 of the pot: it lacks strong hands (dopper+ and overpairs), because almost any opponent will want to start building a pot with them - you never know, you'll check on the turn and he'll miss out on value with his check (and not many people donk on the turn). And given the presence of both flush draws and gutshots on the flop, a check-raise with value hands will be almost 100% of the time. => Since it wasn't there, there are no strong value hands: from two pairs and higher.

What we see: 47.6% of the opponent's initial range on the turn goes through a pot-bet on the river. - This already brings us +EV, because the fold equity here is 100 - 47.6 = 52.4%. And these 2.4% of opponent's overfolds already give us a good autoprofit in the long run.

The blue funnels to the left of the hand categories indicate the hands with which the player will continue to pot-bet. What about dopers, sets and straights is obvious. But regarding top pairs, there is an important point that you can know from your own experience. How often will the opponent call with a top pair agaisnt a pot-bet on the turn, even if its card is total blank?

The answer is here: not always. - And the fact that there is a blank on the turn is not so important; the potsized bet and the fear it instills are much more important here. Besides this, there is also the river, where another bet of an unacceptable betsize can easily fly in.

• And now let's dig a little deeper - maybe we'll find more fold equity, and with it, more autoprofit.

Now we've figured out the general frequency of opponents calling with top pairs - if they call with any TP. And now let's talk about kickers. In a nutshell, TP is usually called on the turn only with top 1-2 kickers, and TP with weaker kickers are rather folded: opponents are afraid of getting under a stronger top pair, and in general - they are just afraid.

In general, it's a matter of taste, and I'm saying what I notice. And if we edit the opponent's continuation range more precisely, we'll have all 55% fold equity. Or even 60% - who knows what the opponent will have in mind at the time of making a decision. And even if I left the range as is, there is auto-profit anyway - it's a fact.

This situation with a continuation bet for 37.5% of the pot and a subsequent pot bet (...) is very profitable in the long run, so it's worth taking it into service and systematically applying it:

• On the flop, the opponent calls a very wide range, and then
• Folds a fairly profitable number of combinations from that wide range on the turn (more than half of the range in this spot).

And then merciless mathematics will do its job.

• Be careful with these spots - especially in easy raised pots (but sometimes in 3-bet pots too).

A live game with $2/$5 blinds. Another example: we are playing out of position in a heads-up pot.

• The flop is  in a $40 pot. We have a low flush draw with no showdown value from . Now we cbet 25 / 40 = 62.5% of the pot. - Opponent calls us.
• On the blank turn  we fire a second barrel 60 / (40+2*25) = 60 / 90 = 67% of the pot. - Villain calls us again.
• On the ambiguous river  we fire a third barrel 350 / (90+2*60) = 350 / 210 = overbet 167% of the pot.

It should be firmly understood that this overbet will be justified by the same reasons as in the previous point. And it will work much better than just «more profitable than check-fold». Because the opponent will be capped heavily on strong hands after they just called on the flop and on the turn.

With two solid continuation bets, we knocked out a lot of weak hands containing  from the opponent's range, so they are now sitting with some kind of second or third pair or just with missed draws. Rarely, they will have an A-high. As a result, they have very few combinations with  that have reached the river, not counting ex-top pairs from TK and rare other pairs.

• And none of these hands will be delighted to face an overbet on the most expensive street.

Now let's calculate the breakeven point of such an overbet. This would be: 350 / (350 + 210) = 62.5% fold equity.

The question is: what percentage of the time will you get a fold here? - Probably so often that you remember how many times you were not paid off on value hands after you overbet on the river. Even against calling stations. So we can safely assume that we have much more than 62.5% fold equity when our opponent faces an overbet by as much as 167% of the pot.

In truth, much smaller overbets are usually enough: 110-120-125-130-150% of the pot. Our fold equity against most opponents will be in the range from excessive to sufficient in response to the very fact of the overbet, which is a very rare guest on the postflop in general, and even more so on the river. Especially at the low(est) stakes.

All those ex-top pairs and second pairs that were valuable before the  came really don't like to face this overbet on the river on a scary card which could make better hands than them in your range. What about ex-top pairs - even the current top pair that has reached the top pair from a conditional KJ (not a top kicker) will also be in a pretty bad shape, fearing to run into a top kicker. - The fact is.

We will have insufficient fold equity only against those who have a grudge against us, against those who reach the river only with TPTK+, or against those who call by nature. But against the latter, you can shift overbets to the value part and get paid more often than usual.

• Remember and accept this fact: no bluff has to work 100% of the time.

Roughly speaking, for 100% fold equity you would need to bet an infinitely large amount of money into an infinitely small pot. For a pot bet you «only» need 50% of your opponent's folds, for an overbet of 150% of the pot - 60% of their folds, for an overbet of 200% of the pot - to see a fold 66.7% of the time, - 2 times out of 3, - which is still incredibly far from any insane values.

Sometimes your opponent will hit the river, or wake up before it, ruining your plans to bluff him out, or even slowplay the nuts - all this is included in the part of the equation that allows for a negative outcome. On your part, you shouldn't go crazy believing that fold equity thresholds are so «low» - sometimes it really will be insufficient.

Many people still try to play by the card, prefer not to bluff much, because they are afraid of feeling like fools when their opponent calls them or even forces them to fold themselves after an overbet on the river in a deep stack. - It's their choice. 

In truth, aggressive play with lots of bluffs is much more interesting than straightforward combination collecting and hoping for payment, it develops you much better in the long run and, first of all, it is much more effective. And as a bonus, it is much more difficult to exploit, because each bluff is quite covered by good hands.

• It's up to you to decide how to play, but if the EV of the bluff is very positive, then pull the trigger - and it will be profitable.