The true cost of triple barrel bluffing

I was looking at a couple of videos on YouTube the other day from a poker player who is at the very top of his profession who I shall not name. The topic was small stakes no limit cash games and he was remarking how important it was to triple barrel bluff. Now maybe I misinterpreted what he said, maybe he didn’t phrase it in the way that it was meant but you have to be very careful emptying the clip in modern online poker. It needs to be done with sophistication these days. While it is true that pot control features heavily in the minds and styles of many players, people are simply far more educated these days and they understand about polarised ranges.

So when you go raise-bet-bet-shove and you make this line repeatedly then you had better allow for an adjustment because this is what the majority of players will do. As a rule they will be looking to adjust after your second time of asking. You will know if your opponent has adjusted because of what hand they show down in a deep stack situation. If you were playing small stakes then your opponent could simply be a bad player but when you reach say NL100 then you know that all of your opponents play to a very decent level of play. So if you have used the line raise-bet-bet-shove with air several times and you have got away with this then I would recommend that you do one of two things.

The initial response is to simply continue but you need to remember that you are always laying odds on here when you make this play. Let us look at an example to show you what I mean. You raise to $3.50 with a $100 stack and the button calls you making $8.50 in the pot……..they also have a $100 stack. The flop comes whatever and you have missed and you make it $6 to go and your opponent calls making the pot $20.50. The turn is whatever and you bet $18 and your opponent calls making the pot $56.50. The river comes and you have still missed and you have around $72 left. You decide to over bet the pot and shove. In this instance then you have risked $100 but if your opponent can call then you lose. However your total gain is only $27.50 less the rake.

While it is true that you could have elicited the same response betting less on the river like with a $45 bet for example you still risk $73 to win $27.50. This is a very poor risk-reward ratio and can be very expensive if you are wrong. Do not get me wrong here; aggressive poker is good poker but only in the right set of circumstances. If your opponent has a very poor non-showdown return then it is clear that they are donating chips to their opponents stack by calling and then folding. Many players call one or two raises and bets and then release. A more sophisticated way to use the raise-bet-bet-shove line may be against the betting patterns of your opponent.

If you feel that you are up against a tricky opponent who likes to float an awful lot then you can triple barrel shove far more effectively in these situations. This is because you know with firm evidence that your opponent will fold a very high percentage of the time. Triple barrel bluffing needs to be done in the right instances because weak players will call you more easily and sophisticated players will call you more easily. The key is to find players who fall in between these two extremes or exhibit a specific pattern.