by Barbara Connors
For aggressive poker players who love to steamroll over the competition, nothing is quite so satisfying as a big bluff. Pushing a mountain of chips into the middle of the table, then watching with quiet satisfaction as your opponent agonizes over the decision, hems and haws, tries to work up the nerve to make the call—only to fold the best hand in the end. It’s a classic form of poker warfare that never gets old.
But seasoned poker players know that a bluff can come in a variety of shapes and sizes. One of the more modest types is known as the post-oak bluff. Particular to no-limit and pot-limit games, a post-oak bluff is a small bet made into a large pot—say, onethird of the pot or less—when the bettor is holding a marginal-to-worthless hand. Traditional bluffs are on the hefty side, since the whole point is to intimidate your opponent into folding. The bigger the bluff, the bigger the intimidation factor.
Post-oak bluffs underbet the pot and go completely against that conventional wisdom. In theory it’s supposed to work something like this: Poker players are always pretending to be strong when they’re really weak, and pretending to be weak when they’re really strong—so by putting out this little bet I can make my opponent think I’m pretending to be weak with a really strong hand.
It’s a decent theory. But the problem with post-oak bluffs is they just aren’t very effective at pushing opponents off of a hand. Even if the ruse succeeds and your opponent becomes convinced that your diminutive bluff was actually a sneaky value-bet with a great hand, he is almost always getting the right price to call anyway, no matter what he holds.
One of the most important aspects of bet-sizing is the need to price out drawing hands. But if your opponent is on a strong draw with a four-flush or an open-ended straight, even a half-pot bet gives him good odds to call. Anything smaller gives an affordable price to just about any opponent on just about any kind of draw. In other words, post-oak bluffs have almost zero fold equity. Moreover, any player with a modicum of intelligence or skill is likely to recognize the post-oak bet for exactly what it is: a timid, half-hearted attempt to push opponents out of the pot. Nine times out of ten an aggressive opponent will pounce on that show of weakness by coming over the top with a large raise, leaving the post-oak bluffer faced with one of two unpleasant choices: Either throw the hand away or get drawn into a potentially disastrous and expensive game of chicken.
When the ploy does work, it’s because opponents recognize that a post oak bluff can appear exactly the same as a value bet. Precisely because the bet is so modest in size, so likely to get called, it looks like a bet that wants to be called. Depending on the exact circumstances—the texture of the community board, the betting patterns on previous rounds, the size of the pot, position, table image, etc —a well-timed post-oak bluff can look like a monster hand trying to suck opponents in. And that is what will scare some opponents into folding— despite the fact that they’re getting a good price to call. But this is a best-case scenario and can only work against thinking opponents, not brain-dead simpletons who just play their own cards.
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