From Break-Even to Crusher: Mastering the Mandatory Bluff

15 Aug 2025

Intermediate

This material is for medium-skilled players

Are you struggling to break out of being breakeven? If consistently boosting your win rate feels impossible, no matter which games you play, this guide is for you. I’m Matt Hunt, and today we’ll discuss the one adjustment that can take you from breakeven to crushing the tables. This isn’t just a technical tweak — it’s a mindset shift that changes how you approach certain key spots in poker.

The adjustment is simple in wording but profound in impact: shift from asking, “Is this a good spot to bluff?” to asking, “What are my bluffs in this spot?”. Bluffing stops being optional—it becomes an essential part of your poker strategy. Here’s why this is so crucial:

• Bluffing isn’t something you can do occasionally and still win consistently. You cannot maximize your expected value (EV) without knowing how to bluff correctly.
• Your perceived bluffing frequency directly affects the EV of your value hands. If opponents don’t think you bluff enough, your value hands won’t earn as much.
• Opponents adjust more than you might realize. Even without a clear concept of ranges, they intuitively respond to how you play and the textures of the board. Spotting bluffs they don’t expect will force folds and win more pots.

Conceptually, the EV of any strategy depends on extracting maximum value from your strong hands. Sims show that bluffs themselves typically break even; their purpose is to get your opponents to pay off when you have a strong hand. That’s why mastering bluffing is non-negotiable. Yet, most players struggle because of a specific mindset issue — what I call the secret wish of all breakeven players.

The Secret Wish of All Breakeven Players

Most breakeven players have a secret wish: they want to get paid every time they have a strong hand and want their opponent to fold every time they bluff. Everyone wishes this were true because it would make poker so much easier.

But the truth is, it’s impossible. Your opponent cannot simultaneously call the river often enough to pay off your value hands and fold frequently enough to make your bluffs profitable at a high rate. Both cannot happen at the same time.

A healthier perspective is to see every bluff as an investment in future EV. Each bluff helps set up your future hands for more profit. It doesn’t even have to be the exact same spot — it can be any situation where you’re playing aggressively against an opponent who is trying to figure out if you’re capable of bluffing enough. 

Every bluff in poker that gets called teaches your opponent that you are capable, which in turn increases the payoff when you actually have a strong hand. Additionally, if you pick the right hands in the right spots, your bluffs will typically break even, so you’re not losing money by making them.

Now normally, I wouldn't be one to blow my own horn too much here, but I do have a few examples from personal experience that have taught me over time the value of making sure that I find bluffs in a variety of spots, especially in situations where my opponents might not be thinking that I was capable of finding enough bluffs.

Example #1

The first one is from a live stream 1‑3 game. Pretty casual live stream game in 2019. I open   suited from the cutoff. The button calls. I check-raise   . Button calls again. Check-check on a turned queen. I bluff the river on an , which I don’t even really know if this is a particularly good bluff in the first place. 

I get raised, and then I decide to 3-bet bluff all-in for less than a min-raise. It turned out the villain was bluffing with a better hand than mine, and we managed to get the villain to fold out the bluff on the river with that 3-bet. This is a spot where it’s really hard to find bluffs, but I arrived in this spot with a full house blocker, decided it might be a good spot to go for it, and it got through. That taught me a lot.

Example #2

The second one, a similar example, playing a 5‑10 cash game in a Poker Out Loud environment in 2019. We open ace-king. We get 3-bet. We decide to mix between 4-bets and calls, so we just call, and then we check-raise on   , bet the turn 7. The river comes in 9, putting a 4‑2 straight out there. Even though in retrospect I probably shouldn’t be bluffing this specific candidate, the spot came up, and I figured it was quite difficult for me to imagine what types of bluffs I’m actually going to have there. 

If it’s difficult for me to know my bluffs, it’s equally difficult for my opponent to know my bluffs. So I turned ace-king into a bluff, jammed the river, and the villain actually folded ace-jack. I was quite pleased that it turned out that way, even though maybe it wasn’t the greatest hand selection on my part on the river.

Example #3

And then finally, a live tournament, $1,600 buy-in in 2022. The villain opens the cutoff with 30 big blinds. We defend with 10‑7 offsuit. We check-raise, and the villain clicks it back on 9‑9‑7. We call, turn a 10, check-call. River is a jack, putting a 4‑2 straight out there. We open-jam the river for about 40% of the pot, figuring that we have more than 8x in our range than the villain does. 

We also have some full houses and other hands. Villain tanks for a long time and actually ends up folding queen-9. Another example where I made an effort to find a bluff in a tough spot. It’s really hard to find bluffs, and it’s really hard for the villain to recognize what my bluffs would be — but it got through, and we won a pot that we otherwise wouldn’t have.

So, a few different examples here show times in the past where this mentality has served me really well, allowing me to find bluffs in situations where I can get folds from hands you might not expect to fold, picking up pots that you otherwise wouldn’t be able to win — just by adopting this mindset of looking for bluffs in these situations.

Now I know what you’re thinking at this point: “But Matt, you don’t understand. My opponents never fold”. Well, my answer to that is — they have to fold somewhere. If they never fold pre-flop, they’ll reach the flop with a wider range, which means they’ll have to fold on the flop more often. If they never fold the flop, then they’ll end up folding on the turn more often. And if they never fold the turn, eventually they’ll have to fold on the river.

And if you’re trying to tell me they never fold even on the river, I call that bluff. Ultimately, opponents aren’t going to get to the river with just any two cards and call with queen-high — it’s just not happening.

So you need to think carefully about where they are folding. You might be right that in some specific spots they rarely fold, but that usually means they folded somewhere earlier in the hand. They likely folded a lot of their range at some point, because ranges have to narrow — from wide to tight.

• If you’re not seeing folds on later streets, turn or river, when attempting bluffs, it probably means something is off with your strategy on earlier streets. Maybe you’re raising too big pre-flop, betting too big on flops, or betting too big on turns.
• You want your opponent to reach the river with a range that isn’t condensed into being so strong that they have no folds left. You want them to still have folds in their range, because that’s when your river bluffs can actually succeed.

Implementation

Now, when it comes to making this adjustment in practice, a big part is adjusting your thought process while you’re playing a hand. Another important part is evaluating each hand as a potential bluff candidate, even if it has some showdown value.

To illustrate this, let’s look at a three-bet pot scenario, which is a great example of situations where many hands in your range on certain board textures will have some degree of showdown value.

So if you're going to actually find bluffs, you need to reach quite ambitiously for candidates and really focus on making sure that certain hands that maybe do have a little bit of showdown value aren't just defaulting to checking back as a standard. Because if they do, then you end up with no bluffs when you actually bet. Let's take a look at that example.

For our spot here, I've got a three-bet pot scenario where we open on the button, get three-bet by the small blind at 150 bigs deep in a cash game scenario. We call and the flop comes 10-9-6 with two spades. Villain's going to check the flop, which they're going to do fairly often. We're going to bet 40% of the pot on the flop, which again also happens relatively often, and they're going to check-call.

Then the turn is going to come the . So that's a card here that completes a ton of draws — king-queen, spades, etc. And of course, the 7-8 was already there on the flop. So not a lot of hands here that are going to constitute just pure air or obvious bluffing candidates. So let's take a look at our strategy once the small blind checks the turn:

You can see that our sizing is about three-quarters pot based on the bet sizing framework that I'm using here. If we isolate the weak hands and trash hands portions of the ranges, you can see quite a few interesting things happening. In fact, if we focus purely on the trash hands, there's quite a lot of hands at the very bottom of the range here that are being used as bluffs.

If I go over to the summary tab and then filter by strategy, you can actually see in a pretty neat and tidy way how these candidates are being chosen. Ace-King with the king of spades is a pretty logical bluff candidate here:

But then you've also got pocket fours, pocket threes, even without a spade, eight-six, seven-six, ace-queen off without a spade. There's a bunch of hands in here that are very non-intuitive bluffing candidates. Then you've got pocket sevens, six-five, five-three suited, five-four suited, even five-four suited with no draw here, which is kind of crazy. It's just pure air. King-five with no draw, again pure air. 

And only when we get down to stuff like pocket threes with a spade, five-three of hearts, stuff like this maybe starts to have more reason to check. And pocket eights, seven-five, you know, there's a few other different types of hands in here that maybe aren't good bluffing candidates. 

But what it comes down to is, if we don't aggressively try to reach for bluffing candidates here in this spot, we're going to end up with no bluffs at all. We're going to end up just playing a completely value-heavy strategy on this turn, where we only have two pair, flushes, straights, sets, things like that. We just don't have any bluffs at all.

So you actually have to try quite hard to ambitiously reach for bluffs in spots like this, because you just end up with none if you don't do that. And then in particular, if the villain calls and let's say the river comes a brick here, well now villain checks. If we want to bluff this river with anything, you can see we have to have five-four here, five-four high.

If I filter for the trash hands, if I filter for the bluffs here, it's five-high, king-high, seven-five, ace-queen, stuff like this that quite often players would just default to checking on the turn, and then they would give up on the river if they get called again. But of course, if you do that, you're going to end up radically under-bluffing. And this is quite often the difference between players that break-even, and players that are really crushing, because they're able to find bluffs in this spot.

And take a look at what your opponent's supposed to do when you bet this river:

When you jam this river, hands like jack-ten are indifferent. Top two pair is indifferent here. Pocket kings is mostly a call, but kind of break-even. Pocket nines are indifferent. Sets, two pairs, hands like that are put in very, very tough spots when you bluff this river.

And if you don't ever aggressively reach for those bluffs, you never get the opportunity to put your opponents in these spots. And like I say, this is a huge difference maker between the players that have the highest win rates and the players that are still struggling.

So our bottom line here, just to wrap things up, is this adjustment — shifting from thinking of bluffing as optional to mandatory — is going to boost your red line significantly.  It's also going to have a huge impact on your ability to get paid off when you have value, because your opponents are going to recognize that you're capable of having bluffs in every spot, and they're really going to have to think carefully about whether they might consider bluff-catching with certain hands that could be folds against other players.

Some advice for going forward and how to study in a way that's going to give you the chance to make this adjustment:

• Focus on spots where your player pool struggles to find enough bluffs.
• It might be certain types of runouts, positional formations, or other factors. If you focus on those situations, you'll be able to find bluffs that your opponents don't expect in your specific spots.
• Think about spots where your player pool is most likely to overfold.
• There's a correlation here: you want to play opposite to the rest of the pool. Find bluffs where the pool is likely to under-bluff or overfold.
• Finally, take a hand you recently played where a low-frequency situation or tricky runout developed. Evaluate whether you were actively thinking about finding bluffs in that spot. If not, review it in a simulator to see what your bluffs should have been, and practice selecting bluffs carefully, especially in spots where they’re not obvious.

So that's going to be it for this topic. Hopefully, this was useful for everybody out there. Otherwise, until next time — good luck, and keep crushing!