The Art Of Checking
In poker, the bluff is a huge move. Some people love to do it, and some people hate getting bluffed, and will almost refuse to, which leads to a player melting down all together. But are there situations where you do not want to bluff or semi-bluff and just check or call? Contrary to the new school hyper aggressive approach, yes, there are. At the low stakes tables, if you are drawing to a straight and can take a free card, go ahead and take it once in a while. I know it seems crazy, but this is low limit specific, where hands are not often going to be folded. When someone is playing there top two pair on the flop, they probably are wanting to check raise you, so they check, you fire a semi bluff bet with second pair, and they come over the top big….now what? You just wasted money betting just to bet. Some helpful poker advice would be instead of betting, getting called, or raised, or the worst case winning a tiny pot, try checking and seeing if you can make your hand.
This is when you are going to get paid off. If you hit your draw on the turn and your opponent at the table was going to check raise you, you are now going to get paid off big time. You will get paid much more in this situation than you would have by taking down a small pot by semi-bluffing. This works extremely well after you have established an image of possibly semi bluffing your way to win some small pots, then when you take your free card and hit, the opponent will assume you are again bluffing, and bingo, ship it. Semi bluffing is great when the pot is big, you have a huge draw and enough of a stack to make a big bet to induce a fold.
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