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A woman came up to me the other day at The Palms, complaining that in her regular home game, whenever she bluffed, she always got called. She asked me if I had any advice for her, and my reply was, “Then don’t bluff!” I felt like I was telling the punch line to the old joke where the guy goes into the doctor’s office and says, “Doc, it hurts when I lift up my arm like this.” And the doctor replies, “Then don’t do that.” But I was dead serious. The woman gave me a quizzical look and said, “But then I’m not playing poker.”
Here is where I got serious. Just because you’re not bluffing does not mean you’re not playing poker. There is a commonly held belief that the bluff, the sexiest part of poker, the part where you win a pot despite having the worst hand, is what poker is all about. But this is patently untrue. Poker is about tailoring your game to suit the context of the game you are playing in. It’s about figuring out the optimal strategy to take the other players’ money at the table. If that optimal strategy does not include bluffing, and yet you continue to bluff because you think that is what poker is about, then you are playing poorly. You are giving away equity where none should be given. And that’s not playing good poker. It’s quite the opposite.
Bluffing is all about advertisement. The equity in bluffing comes from two places: The first is the equity in the bluff itself at that moment, and the second is in the future equity the bluff gives you. The equity in the bluff itself has to do with the probability that the bluff will win the pot right there. In general, bluffs are negative equity plays if you only take into account the present equity in the bluff. Bluffs are about break-even-to-slightly-losing plays, because you expect to get caught a certain percentage of the time. In fact, you want to get caught because of the second type of equity — future equity.
The value in bluffing mainly comes from people catching you so that you will get paid off when you actually have a good hand later. If you never bluff and you are playing with attentive opponents, then, when you enter a pot, they will know you have a very strong hand and never give you any action. This means that if you never bluff, you will not make money with your good hands against attentive opponents. We bluff to keep our opponents guessing so we can get paid off when we have the goods.
So what about our heroine’s home game? If there is future equity in bluffing, then why did I tell her to stop? It’s because you have to tailor your game to be effective for the way that game plays. This woman plays in a game where opponents are clearly calling every hand to the river. I knew this because she said that she always gets called on the end when she attempts a bluff. Assuming she’s telling the truth, then that means her opponents are loose calling stations, and bluffing such opponents is just throwing good money away. If your opponents are already giving you action, then why would you pay to advertise to get the action you are already getting?
Think of yourself like Coca Cola. When Coke buys advertising, the expense is initially negative equity because Coke has to pay for it at that time. But the company knows there is future equity in the purchase, since it will presumably get you to buy their product instead of, say, Pepsi, and the advertising will generate future revenue that is more than the cost of advertising. This makes advertising for them an upequity play. But what if Coke were the only soft drink in the world and everyone was crazy for soft drinks? When you walked down the aisles of the supermarket, the only soft drink available to purchase was Coke. Then would Coke spend any money on advertising? Of course not. In a world in which there was only Coke, Coke would never advertise.
A loose game, full of calling stations, is just like a world of only Coke and no Pepsi. Your opponents are already buying your product. When you raise, they call. When you make a good hand, they call. They call when you haven’t played a hand in an hour. They call when you have played the last five hands in a row. They don’t care. They don’t even notice. They just play their cards, and not well at that. If your opponents aren’t watching you, if they are paying no attention, then advertising to them is ridiculous since they won’t notice the ad in the first place. Bluffing these types of opponents has no future equity since it doesn’t increase the likelihood they will call you.
So if your game is like our heroine’s — if you are playing with calling stations — then the equity in the bluff itself is almost nonexistent. Bluffs don’t work against opponents who call all the time, so there is no present equity in the bluff itself. So then, the only reason to bluff would be for future equity and, well, we already established that there isn’t any.
In a tight game, the situation is exactly reversed. The equity in the bluff itself skyrockets since the bluff has a high probability of success against super-tight opponents. Not only that, but those opponents are going to be paying attention to you and be reluctant to ever pay you off. Against opponents like this, you are living in a world where the Coca Cola you are selling is competing against Pepsi, RC, 7up, Sprite, ad infinitum. You need to advertise to get some business. You need to advertise that you are willing to play weak hands in order to get opponents like that to pay off your real hands. Now bluffing makes all the sense in the world.
These are, of course, two extremes, and most games have a mix of tight and loose players. You should bluff tight opponents, but remember that bluffing is a wasted play on loose opponents. Always keep in mind the type of people you are in the hand with and figure out where on the bluffing scale they fall: Are they unlikely to be bluffed because they love to call, thus creating a situation in which there is little present equity and no future equity? Or are they likely to be bluffed because they are very conservative and, thus, the equity in the bluff itself is high and there is a high need to advertise to that opponent for the future hands?
Poker is not a game of only the sexy stuff. Yes, winning with the worst hand is exhilarating. It gets the adrenaline going. It makes you feel smart and powerful and brilliant. But that does not mean the game is not poker without it. If you are in a game where bluffing is a wasted play — more than that, a hugely losing play — then insisting on bluffing just because you think you are not playing poker without it, well, that is not playing poker. Poker is about adjusting to the game you are in, and sometimes that means letting people come to you; letting them impale themselves on your chips as you run the nuts into them before they know what hit them. Now that’s sexy.
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