Poker Strategy

Bluffing the Flush
This is a term I've only recently heard for something I commonly do! There is a style of player who would be scared by his own shadow. Every card that comes down either helps him, or in his mind, helps his opponent. Its like they are scolded children, they flinch at every card because they've been "bad beat" so often they are mentally scarred for life. Here's how you kick ‘em when they're down!

"Blushing" was described to me as "bluffing the flush". This is a standard tactic in offline card rooms where they are referred to as "scare cards". These are cards that couldn't really have helped the post-flop raiser but you might be able to use to scare him off the hand. You can only pull this trick with decent but not very good players. Bad players are usually too busy pawing their monitor and blowing kisses to their pair of aces to notice that the board has come down 9TJQ with 3 hearts. These guys you can't bluff because they are too naive to scare, they simply haven't considered the danger.

Very good players will either know what you are at or will know that you couldn't have called their post flop bet with a flush draw if it was a big enough bet. In this case, that's the difference between good and bad players, the good ones replay the entire hand in their heads to see if you could have played the way you did with a hand that could now beat them.

So, this play is reserved for good players who can see danger on a board but not so good that they can tell you are trying to use a scare card. Once you are sure you can take him off the hand, wait until a scare card comes and then raise or reraise them. This can be a very very useful weapon in your arsenal. Consider this hand:

There is a preflop raise which you call with JTo (off-suit). The flop comes down 9QA with 2 spades and the raiser bets the pot and conventional wisdom says you should fold as you have an open ended straight draw only. However if you are fairly sure your opponent has and ace, you can be sure he wants to kill the pot odds for any straight/flush draws. Now you shouldn't call because you only have 8 cards going for you... but your opponent doesn't know that! So if an 8 or a king falls you have a straight but if a spade comes you can be fairly sure of pushing him off the hand. So now you have plenty of cards going for you!!

**WARNING** advanced players tend to bet their flush and straight draws as its a good play statistically. You might find yourself representing the very hand he has just made! This isn't a trick you can pull every hand but against the right level of player and at the right time you can certainly use it to make some money!