Bluffing in Poker is Skill not Luck

Bluffing is an integral part of poker. More precisely, it is an integral part of every single bet or raise you make, since every bet or raise carries with it a chance of winning a pot immediately, regardless of your cards. Knowing when to attempt a bluff depends heavily on our perceptions of your opponents, their perceptions of you, and the circumtances of the hand.

Some aspects of bluffing can be modeled using expected value, since very time you bluff, you are making a bet that has a certain chance of winning a pot of a certain size. If it were possible to quantify the chance of a bluff succeeding, bluffing strategy would simply be a matter of making a bluff whenever it had a positive expectation. In the real world, of course, no precise odds of winning can be assigned to a bluff, because you have incomplete knowledge of your opponents' holdings and inclinations. Even so, the expected value model does illuminate the fact that bluffs only have to succeed a certain fraction of the time, based on their pot odds, to generate a net profit. In other words, you aren't a bad poker player if you get caught bluffing sometimes, or even most of the time. It only takes a few successes to come out on top.

Bluffing obviously has a huge psychological component. But there's nothing mystical about bluffing, and there are some concrete factors, some of them fairly obvious, that offer some ground rules:

1. In oder to win a pot by bluffing, you must make all your opponents fold. This objective is much more easily accomplished when you are against one opponent than against six, for instance. 2. Bluffs don't work when your opponents have strong hands. In Seven-Card Stud, no competent opponent is going to fold a straight just because you look like you might have a flush, especially in a fixed-limit format. 3. Bluffs work best when your opponents have some reason to believe that you have a winning hand. 4. Bluffs work best when your opponents don't stand to lose much by folding. In other words, it is easier to bluff opponents out of small pots than big ones. The epitome of bluffing at a small pot is when you try to "steal" the antes or the blinds by raising on the opening betting round. 5. Bluffs work best against players who are tight, that is, who are willing to drop their hands when they believe they are at a disadvantage. Players can become abnormally tight under several circumstances, such as during or after a losing streak, when they are just above even for a session, or when they are playing at limits that are excessively high for their circumtances. 6. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, bluffs work best when you have an image as a tight and/or passive player, for reasons that should be obvious.

Defending yourself against bluffing is simply a matter of turning these factors around, but you will notice that basic strategy and defense against bluffing come into conflict. The reason for this is that good bluffers bluff when they know that it makes sense according to basic strategy for you to fold. For example, if an opponent raises you when the pot is small, basic strategy tells you that the small pot is more reason to fold, while the present discussion tells you that the small pot is more reason to believe that your opponent is bluffing, and to thus call. This conflict is irreconcilable, and corrobates with a claim that a perfect defense against bluffing is theoretically impossible. What a game!