Most poker players know they can’t bluff too much of the time and they can’t hang back and never bluff either.
 
If you bluff too frequently others will quickly become aware of it and call with any hand that stands a chance of winning. They’ll also take shots at you by raising with nothing. They’ll do this because they figure you bluff so much of the time that you frequently don’t have much of a hand when you come out betting and therefore aren’t able to call a raise. When running a bluff and raised, most players accept the fact that they’ve been caught speeding, and fold their hands.
 
Because larger sums of money can be plunked down on the table in a no-limit game, bluffing has a greater tendency to succeed in these games. But a bluff that’s snapped-off in a no-limit game can have a much higher cost than the one additional bet it would have cost in a fixed-limit game.
 
If you bluff infrequently, your opponents will pick on that too. They’ll know you don’t have much of a hand whenever you check and will respond by betting into you. If you bet, your opponents will step deftly out of your way unless they have big hands too. They’ll have a pretty good handle on the strength of your hand because by seldom bluffing you are easy to read. Any opponents who bluff some of the time—not too often, but not too infrequently either—won’t be as easy for you to read as you are to them, so guess who has the advantage?
 
When your opponents are undecided about whether you actually have the hand you’re representing, they’ll have to guess. And when they guess, they’ll be dead wrong a good portion of the time. Every time an opponent errs in judgment, it pays off for you. The trick is to create this confusion.
 
A semi bluff is a bet with a hand that’s probably not the best hand right now, but a hand that stands a good chance of outdrawing any opponents who call.
 
A “good chance” excludes all the two, three, four, and five-out hands. While they all have a chance of improving to the best hand, we’ll consider hands with more than five outs as those that have a “good chance” of improving. While a hand with fewer than five outs has a chance to win too, it’s a long shot, not a good one.
 
Semi bluffing provides two ways to win. Your opponent can fold and you’ll win the pot, but even if you are called, you have a reasonable chance of catching one of the cards you need to make your hand. And if you do, you will have improved to a hand that is better than your opponent’s hand, and you can keep betting on future wagering rounds. But once you make your hand, you’ll be firing money at the pot with the best of it.
 
But to give yourself two ways to win, a semi bluff can only be made with more cards to come. If you bet the river with an unmade draw, you’ll only win if your opponent folds; you can’t win if he calls. If you bet on the flop or turn, you can win if he folds—this is referred to as “fold equity” by many players—and you also have a chance to win by improving.
 
When you add up those two chances of winning, your situation might improve from a poor one to a good one, and that’s the beauty of semi bluffing.
 
Every good player has this weapon in his or her arsenal. It may be employed as a bet, as a raise, or even as a check-raise.
 
More to come in the next column.
 
Visit Lou Krieger online at www.loukrieger.com, where you can read his blog, and check out all of his books. Write directly to him at loukrieger@aol.com.