Bluffs When There are More Cards to Come

When there are more cards to come, your bluffs should rarely be pure bluffs - that is to say, bets or raises that have little or no chance of winning if you are called, even taking into account the cards you may get on future rounds. Instead your early-round bets should be semi-bluffs, those powerful, deceptive plays we looked at in detail in Chapters Eleven and Twelve. It is important to bluff occasionally on early rounds to keep your opponents off-balance. But why do it when you have only one or two ways of winning? For a pure bluff to work, your opponent or opponents must generally fold immediately. However, as we saw in Chapter Eleven, a semi-bluff has three ways of winning. It may win because your opponent folds immediately, and it may also win either because you catch a scare card that causes your opponent to fold on a later round or because you make the best hand.
Nevertheless, while you should usually restrict your early-round bluffs to semi-bluffs, there is still nothing to prevent you from trying a pure bluff if you feel there's a good chance of getting away with it. If you think your chances of getting away with it are greater than the pot odds you are getting, then you should go ahead and try it. You may recall in the chapter on ante structure we mentioned playing in a game where certain players played too tight for the ante. There was $10 in antes, and if these players were the only ones in the pot, I knew I could bet $7 with absolutely nothing and have a good chance of stealing that $10. My pot odds in that instance were less than 11/2-to-1, but I knew I could get away with the bluff about 60 percent of the time. So it was a profitable play.