Why is Inducing Bluffs Just as Important as Value Betting?

For a long time, most strategy for beginning and intermediate players for online poker has centered around taking advantage of loose and/or passive opponents. That’s a thought process that’s modeled after the older style of “fish,” but today’s players are better than that. More often than not, the players you’re going to be able to take advantage of the most have some basic understanding of aggression and essential poker concepts, so the way you beat them has to change as well.

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Its really an interesting article. It all comes to what we have and what is the opponent likely to have, but I would say that more oftenly we will check to induce a bet right? lets say we think opponent has missed his draws and we have a hand that's not near the nuts but we think we are beating him, it is better to check to induce bluffs, because if he checks behind we would earn the same as if we had bet because he would have folded, but if he thinks he can bluff us then its more money to the pot.

Originally Posted by matiusaa

Its really an interesting article. It all comes to what we have and what is the opponent likely to have, but I would say that more oftenly we will check to induce a bet right? lets say we think opponent has missed his draws and we have a hand that's not near the nuts but we think we are beating him, it is better to check to induce bluffs, because if he checks behind we would earn the same as if we had bet because he would have folded, but if he thinks he can bluff us then its more money to the pot.

Regarding the bold, it just depends. I broke the article down in terms of basics on the river to give players a starting point as far as what they're thinking about in those situations, but on earlier streets, you also have pot control issues to think about.

For example, suppose we have 100bb effective stacks and raise in the HJ pre-flop and get called by a tagg on the button. If we have something like As5s on a flop of AhTs4d, then it can be hard to necessarily justify a bet on the flop compared to checking even though we are likely to be ahead of our opponent's calling range on the flop alone. The issue is that we aren't going to be able to get three streets of value (since we'll be behind his calling range if we go bet-bet-bet), but we can probably get two. From there, we have to decide how to best get those two streets of value. The more streets that involve a tight-aggressive opponent betting, the more equity we'll be likely to have. The opposite goes for a loose-passive opponent.