Lesson
The 22-Big-Blind River Bluff That Wasn't Necessary
River Bluffing · advanced · 10 min
Tyler and Eric review a hand where Eric bets the turn with ten-nine, then jams river with no showdown value after recognizing the line may not generate enough folds. The lesson focuses on choosing turn bluffs that can tolerate a check-raise, evaluating whether a river bluff has fold equity, and using range construction and fold-frequency estimates to judge how costly a mistake really is.
Key takeaways
- Avoid betting turn with hands like T9 or T8 when getting check-raised would force you to give up meaningful equity.
- Prefer turn bets with hands that are more forced to deny equity or can continue better, such as low pairs that get overcarded often, random floats, gutshots, many Jx hands, and some stronger Qx.
- Before bluffing river, ask what hands called the turn and which of those hands will actually fold to the river shove.
- A bluff can be theoretically hard to overdo when your range contains many value hands, but still perform poorly if the opponent is likely to overcall that node.
- Estimate the EV impact of a questionable bluff using realistic river fold frequencies instead of judging the hand only by the result.