Play Better Poker

Semi- bluffing is a very powerful play in Hold’em.  Not only is it immediately profitable in many cases, but it also helps disguise your good hands.  You can’t simply bet all your made hands, and then check-call with all your draws and check-fold all your junk hands.  Then anytime you be, your opponents will know that you have a hand. So in order to prevent this you should semi bluff with good draws a decent amount of time on the flop.

                Semi-bluffing can be done by betting or by check-raising.  You should do most of it by simply betting, since that is what you will do with most of your made hands as well, but you must also do small amount  of semi-bluff check raising just to keep your opponents guessing.  Flush draws, straight draws, and even over cards can all be excellent hands to semi-bluff with.  Remember that the more outs you have, the less chance you need to steal immediately for a semi bluff to be profitable.

                Of course, the few opponents in the pot, the greater your odds of stealing, so the more you should semi-bluff.  Also the lower the board cards are, the less likely it is that one of your opponents will call. The exception to this is certain times when an ace flops. Often your opponents preflop actions will indicate to you that they have a weak hand.  Maybe they just limp in a middle position after everyone folded to them or maybe they limped in late position with only one limper already.  Strong players would probably have raised an ace in either of those positions.

                Furthermore, the ace makes it very hard for opponents to call with weak holdings; if they don’t have a pair, they know that they will have to get tow pair or better to beat anyone who does have an ace.  Even if they have a smaller pair, an ace is very scary to them because a lot of people see flops with an ace in their hand.  So you might want to semi=bluff in certain situations where you flop an open –end or four-flush and there is an ace on the board and someone lets you know that they have an ace, at least you have outs.