My Bad River Bluff at $200 NL

Michael Gugel
AnskyPoker
Published in
1 min readSep 27, 2009

I’m playing $200 NL against Cricket Scores, a somewhat decent regular. We stacked off preflop when my AKs ran into his pocket queens. At this point, we’ve only played like 20 hands or so.

BB ($395.50)
Hero (SB) ($205.50)

Preflop: Hero is SB with Js, 2c
Hero bets $6, BB calls $4

Flop: ($12) 5c, 7h, 10d (2 players)
BB bets $7, Hero calls $7
This is the first time he’s donked into me, so I have no idea what his donking-range is. Folding here is definitely standard, but there’s a lot of cards that can come on the turn that I can bluff.

Turn: ($26) 10s (2 players)
BB bets $18, Hero raises to $42.50, BB calls $24.50
This is a really awesome card for me and if I call the flop, this is a must-bluff situation.

River: ($111) 7d (2 players)
BB checks, Hero bets $55.50
Here, I think I made a mistake. There is absolutely no need to bluff here. I’m only getting weaker hands to fold (like 68 or 89). My jack high might be good!

He ended up shoving over my river bet and I obviously folded.

Before you fire out a bluff, always think about hands the villain might have that are stronger than yours and if the villain will fold those hands. If no stronger hand folds, then it’s a bad bluff! In this case, there just wasn’t many hands that the villain could conceivably have that are stronger than mine and would fold to my bet.

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