Inducing Blufs - Playing Mentality Poker

When you are making a bet it is always important to understand the purpose of the bet and how your opponent will see it. Each bet, check, or raise you make needs to have a purpose and as you play it is important to define that purpose for each hand you play. Often the biggest mistakes in poker are made when we take medium strength hands too far. We inflate the pot size for our hand and then get into trouble on later streets when our hand becomes 2 nd best or our opponent already had a better hand.


The point of bluff induction is two fold. First we attempt to minimize the pot size with a medium strength hand in order to see a showdown and prevent ourselves from getting all-in with the worst of it or be bluffed off our hand. Second we try to give our opponent some rope and hope he makes a misplay and puts money in the pot with a bluff. Being able to correctly induce bluffs and control the size of the pot are key skills for a no limit player.





Most importantly our goal is force our poker opponents into bad situations and have them make bad bets while protecting ourselves from making similar bad bets. Since each bet we make must have a purpose we need to consider: Am I value betting or bluffing in this spot? Will my opponent call with a worse hand here or am I trying to push him off a better hand? One of the most paramount skills for a no limit player is the ability to make a stark contrast between his bluffs and value bets. The power of bluff induction comes in the middle, often when our hand is only just strong enough to value bet but too good to turn into a bluff. These are situations where we are neither bluffing nor value betting because our hand strength is mediocre. Instead of making a bet that has no meaning we instead choose to check with the intention of calling and allow our opponents to bet worse hands.


Most players don’t use bluff induction enough in their game. Instead they focus too much on their own hand strength. They will often double barrel on Axx or Kxx boards with top pair medium kicker. While this play has its place and is often provides a solid place to bet again on the turn often a higher expected value play will come from checking and allowing your opponent to bet. Consider, your opponent has already called one bet, he has a hand why not let him try to push you off your medium strength hand instead of betting and allowing him to play better. What I mean by this is often when you value bet with mediocre holdings on the turn and river you are allowing your opponents to fold out worse hands and call/raise with better hands. It is situations like this that we look for when we attempt to induce bluffs.


With the increase in post flop playback over the past year in online games bluff induction has become an increasingly important tool. Although being able to make re-bluffs and replay-backs can help you deal with playback as well it is often easier and safer to use bluff induction as your main tool to stop your opponents from making too many bluff flop raises and floats. If you are playing your hands in too straightforward of a fashion you will push your opponents out of the pot when you still have value to extract and allow them to play their hands far too easily.


Bluff induction isn’t just a powerful tool for the reasons I have already mentioned. If we are able to read our opponents hands well and can make good big calls we can use our bigger hands and even our weaker hands to induce bluffs. Instead of betting on the flop with a weak top pair perhaps we check and let our opponents do the betting in the hand for us. Or perhaps we check the flop with a good hand in order to get opponents with weaker hands to call value bets on later streets. No matter the specific situation bluff induction can be a great tool in order to extract value because it leaves your hand values more open ended then continuously value betting. For example, if we choose to value bet our hands over and over we never correctly punish opponents who playback by just calling on earlier streets to attempt to take the pot away later. We don’t punish players who attempt to bluff their missed draws on the river and we just don’t get enough value for our hands.