Has anyone either personally tried to track their own gain/loss from bluffing or know of any articles trying to analyze the profitability of bluffing in NL cash games?

I used to play very much by the book but have started to try and add the bluff to my game a bit more, especially looking at pot odds. E.g If I bet $40 into a $50 pot and believe my opponent folds 50% of the time, I should make the move.

I am thinking of recording all my bluffs over the next month or so and deciding whether it is profitable or not, perhaps differentiating between situations, stack sizes, opponents playing styles, size of bluff relative to pot etc.

Is this worthwhile?

I've recently incorporated at lot of mini bluffs into my game and found it to work very well. By "mini bluff" I mean betting out with low pair/two over cards/inside straight draws etc... not quite semi bluffs because I dont have a good draw, but enough that if I get called I have some possibility of improving. I've been amazed at how little I get called down.

Check out the Book of Bluffs by Matt Lessinger. It came out recently. I read the intro and some material in between, and need to get back to it.

I'm not a cash game player, so I can't comment on making moves in cash games. But it seems like with tourneys there are more opportunities (at least PF) given the stack sizes relative to the ever increasing blinds.

I'm a big fan of Lessinger's book. For each bluffing situation that he describes, he rates it for the likelihood of success (among other things). I'm not sure how scientific his ratings are, but when I read the book, the ratings seems to correspond intuitively to the success I would have expected given my own experience in playing.

Also, I think that Lessinger's examples are almost entirely drawn from cash games (and I know that they are all actual hands, not hypotheticals).

I have read a lot of articles about not bluffing recently so I will throw my 2 cents in. If you are playing small stakes poker (less than say $10/$20) then there is no point in bluffing. People say they don't want to be percieved as rocks, but the fish are not paying close enough attention to know you are a rock. If you are playing with a fellow shark you don't want to bumps heads with him anyway. And there is also the fact that you can't bluff a calling station, because they are going to call you down, and you had better hope you have the better hand.

All of the articles say the same thing. Just play your premium hands, because in a small stakes game, they are going to pay you off anyway.

As for SnG's and MTT's I would say all bets are off as far as bluffing goes. But in ring games, don't worry about it.

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Nimvin
"I bet how much?!"

The problem with bluffing is that a lot of your "successful" bluffs are that because your opponent didn't have anything anyway. He could have been playing suited connectors and missed, or making a move himself. His folding doesn't mean you made a better hand fold!

I think you have to bluff a certain amount though, because often neither of you will have anything. Say you have unimproved AK. By betting you could make an underpair fold... but often not. If he doesn't have a pair, then it wouldn't be a bluff... you're allready ahead. But if you DONT bet/bluff, he'll often try it himself, and you'll have sacrificed your shot at the pot. So while bluffing will rarely make the best hand fold here, it will often protect your holding that is actually best but too weak to call a bet with.

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-You may not know this, but poker is a game of incomplete information.