Steal This Pot: The Poker Bluff

A great deal of an excellent poker player's profit comes from "cunning, fraud and flight." Those are the three means Paul Goodman said young men could use to avoid the draft during the Vietnam War. Thinking about the words in the context of draft avoidance helps understand how they apply to poker.

Of those three, I believe flight is the most important skill of all, since folding is the most common poker action. But today we are going to talk about fraud. Fraud can be used in bluffing, semi-bluffing, misrepresenting, deceiving, and manipulating. A lot of the ways you can use fraud can be boiled down to one word: stealing. Steal bets, steal pots, steal position, steal initiative -- excellent players take edges wherever they can find them. They create their own opportunities. They even take the opportunities that others should take.

This is an “all the market will bear” situation. There are some game types where stealing more is the right thing to do, while in some games stealing less is correct. There are no absolutes. You just need to know that you have to steal some value, some times. If you only win pots when you have the best hand, your only chance of beating poker is by playing against truly dreadful opponents. At the same time, if you try to win all the pots where you don’t have the best hand, you’ll be sleeping in the street in no time. The point is to “steal” an appropriate percentage of the pots you couldn’t win by showing down.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking “steal” equals “bluff.” Bluffing is just one way to steal in poker. You can “steal the button” by making a bet or raise with a weak hand so that you get the most advantageous position in later betting rounds. The clichéd “free card” raise is an attempt to steal a free ride for a betting round. “Stealing the blinds” can occur when a player raises with a mediocre hand because it looks like he will not be called by anyone. In HiLo games you can “steal half the pot” several ways, like by raising out other players when you hold a hand that has mediocre high value and mediocre low value but is unlikely to get scooped by one opponent.

But pure bluffing will always be the flashiest, most adrenalin-pumping action in poker. Effective bluffing results in some of the most critical income a player can create.

This is an “all the market will bear” situation. There are some game types where stealing more is the right thing to do, while in some games stealing less is correct. There are no absolutes. You just need to know that you have to steal some value, some times. If you only win pots when you have the best hand, your only chance of beating poker is by playing against truly dreadful opponents. At the same time, if you try to win all the pots where you don’t have the best hand, you’ll be sleeping in the street in no time. The point is to “steal” an appropriate percentage of the pots you couldn’t win by showing down.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking “steal” equals “bluff.” Bluffing is just one way to steal in poker. You can “steal the button” by making a bet or raise with a weak hand so that you get the most advantageous position in later betting rounds. The clichéd “free card” raise is an attempt to steal a free ride for a betting round. “Stealing the blinds” can occur when a player raises with a mediocre hand because it looks like he will not be called by anyone. In HiLo games you can “steal half the pot” several ways, like by raising out other players when you hold a hand that has mediocre high value and mediocre low value but is unlikely to get scooped by one opponent.

But pure bluffing will always be the flashiest, most adrenalin-pumping action in poker. Effective bluffing results in some of the most critical income a player can create.