Can You Win alot of money in poker without ever bluffing. Probably, In fact thats the easiest way to win in cash games especially in the ultra loose cash games online. Still, If you can’t make a bluff at the right time your just throwing away money that you could be raking in.

So I’m going to give you a good Crash Course in Bluffing Starting with The Semi Bluff.

Now by definition a semi Bluff is a Bluff that accompanies either a draw or when you supect that you may have a tied hand or a slighlty better hand.

To Clarify this I’m going to review a hand I played last night on Full Tilt Poker. I limped in with AK and a fairly strong/Tight player raises. I fear a coin flop so I didn’t want to risk gambling so I flat call. The flop is all low cards so I check call and I start to get the feeling that he’s got a medium pair or AK/AJ. The Turn comes a queen which is the perfect card for me. If he did have AK /JJ/TT or AJ the queen hurts him quite a bit if He has AQ or KQ I believe I would pick up a change in his betting pattern. He bets out again just under a potsize bet and I immediately RRs a little more than the size of the pot. He thought about it and folded and I dragged in a big pot!

The Key parts of this hand are:

1.  I had played for a long time with this  player prior to trying this move.
2. He was a good player. A bad player would have probably called me with JJ or even 88 and I would have had to catch an A or K.
3. I was very confident of my read. If I only had an inkling of what he had this would be  losing play in the long run.
4. The part that is least apparent is that every move I made in the hand has a mathematical element behind it. That is to say if you are going to make a bluff like this you need to be picking up this hand at least 2 out of every 3 times you try it. If there not folding at least that often your doing something wrong. That may mean your not cut out for big bluffs still you can uses smaller high percentage bluffs when the timing is right.

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