How Your “Perfect” Bluffs and Hero Calls Are Torching Money

08 Sep 2025

Intermediate

This material is for medium-skilled players

You know those “perfect” bluffs and hero calls you rehearse in your head? The ones you think will make you a genius at the table? Yeah… those are often burning your money faster than bad luck ever could. Overthinking every play, second-guessing every read — it messes with your game more than it helps.

The truth is, the players who consistently win aren’t the ones hitting perfect bluffs or flawless hero calls every time. They’re the ones who trust themselves, stay calm under pressure, and play with confidence. Confidence lets you make the right moves without hesitation, recover from mistakes fast, and turn bad cards or swings into just another hand.

In this article, we’re going to break down two things: how chasing “perfect” plays can cost you money, and why real confidence at the table will make you a better player—and put more chips in your stack.

In theory, optimal poker requires mixing frequencies. You can’t always bluff, and you can’t always call with a bluff-catcher. The math demands that sometimes you fold, sometimes you continue — even with the same hand in the same spot.

Many players try to “randomize” their decisions with tricks like shuffling cards, glancing at the clock, or checking their watch to decide whether to call or fold. While entertaining to watch on streams, these methods aren’t truly random — and more importantly, they don’t fix the real problem.

The Reality of Human Bias

The truth is, almost nobody plays these spots in a balanced way. Instead of true randomization, decisions get driven by mood and external context:

• On tilt? You overcall because “they could be bluffing”.
• Protecting a big win? You overfold because you don’t want to lose your stack.
• Chasing losses? You fire a bluff that feels “perfect” — even when it isn’t.

Same hand, same spot — but your state of mind changes the outcome. You justify it afterward, but in reality, you’re not mixing frequencies at all. You’re just rationalizing biased decisions.

Why Randomizing Is a Leak

Even if you’ve memorized solver outputs and know the exact mix of calls and folds, trying to “force” randomization by shuffling cards or checking your watch is a losing strategy. Solvers assume perfect balance — humans don’t play that way.

Your opponents aren’t mixing optimally. They’re either:

• Always firing the bluff when tilted, or;
• Never pulling the trigger when they’re scared.

If you ignore that and flip a coin for your decision, you’re torching EV. Instead, the money comes from identifying which mode they’re currently in and adjusting.

Every decision doesn’t need to fit into a fixed, eternal strategy. You’re not playing against a robot — you’re playing against a person whose choices are colored by emotion, fatigue, and recent results.

But there’s a catch: you can only do this if you’re present with your own emotions. If you’re running on autopilot — always bluffing with the Ten of Clubs just because it feels like the “solver-approved” combo — you fall into the same trap as your opponents.

It’s easy to get caught up in the GTO mindset: “I can’t call with this hand… I must always fold this blocker… I can only bluff with this combo.” But here’s the truth — those rules only matter if your opponent is playing by the same framework.

Most players aren’t. They live on the always/never spectrum:

• Always firing when tilted;
• Never bluffing when scared;
• Always folding when up big and protecting a stack.

If you cling to solver dogma in these spots, you’re leaving money on the table. The job of a winning player is to strip away those assumptions and adapt in real time.

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Winning vs. Looking Smart

Too many players want to “sound GTO correct” instead of maximizing profit. They’re more worried about looking sharp in a hand review than about pulling the trigger when an opponent is clearly overbluffing.

Ask yourself at the table: “Do you want to win the pot, or do you want to sound clever when you explain the hand later?”. “Do you want to impress with technical jargon, or do you want to actually book a winning session?”. The player who quotes solvers the best isn’t always the one making the most money. Once you’ve put in the study, you face a fork in the road: play to look smart or play to get paid.

Poker isn’t played in bulk. You’re not at the table to solve a million hands at once — you’re making one decision at a time. And after each decision, emotions ripple across the table. Your opponent feels something, you feel something, even the dealer feels the tension.

Those emotional shifts push players further into always or never modes, or sometimes swing them the other way entirely. Your job is to track those shifts, stay present, and exploit them. That’s not only more profitable — it’s more fun.

The Trap of Justifying Losses

Without presence and clarity, your mind invents justifications for mistakes:

• “I had perfect blockers”;
• “Solver says I should call sometimes”.

That’s what you’ll tell a friend after torching a stack in the biggest pot of your session. But often, it wasn’t about blockers at all. It was about being emotionally blocked yourself — too tilted, too scared, or too rigid to see the obvious: in that moment, against that opponent, they simply were never bluffing.

You’ll lean on blockers, convince yourself it was a “perfect bluff”, and later tell the sad tale about how you just happened to run into the top of someone’s range. But maybe the reality was simpler: your opponent was in the always-calling zone, and you didn’t see it.

Poker isn’t about perfection. You’ll never have clairvoyance over another player’s mindset. But if you commit to being present, aware of your own emotional state, and tuned into theirs, the game changes. Openings appear. Patterns become obvious. Spots that once felt impossible suddenly feel easy.

If you want to stop justifying bad punts with “wrong opponent, right bluff”, you need to build the habit of presence. That’s the real skill — seeing where people are emotionally, recognizing when they’re always or never, and adjusting faster than they do. Everything else? Noise. That’s poker: read where they’re at, stay one step ahead.

If you want to start winning more money at poker right now — without studying more, adding new routines, or changing anything else — the one thing that matters is being the most confident version of yourself every time you sit down. Think about it. You play better and win more when you’re confident. Now imagine if you could play like that all the time. That’s a lot more money.

Look at the guys everyone complains about: “Why is he so confident? He’s not that great, he doesn’t study much, and yet he keeps winning”. People don’t get it. Confidence is real, whether you earned it or not. And when it’s real, it shows in how you play. You trust your instincts. You believe you can win, no matter what.

Trying to fake confidence never works. It’s not about acting like you belong or pretending you’ve been there before. Confidence has to come from inside. Most players wait to win first to feel confident, but it’s the other way around: confidence comes first, and winning follows.

The Confidence Killer

When you’re winning and playing well, your confidence naturally grows. Each session reinforces the feeling: “I can play well. I can keep winning”. But here’s the problem — this kind of confidence depends on winning, and winning is mostly out of your control. You can’t control the cards you get or the way the deck runs.

The number one way players lose confidence is by flipping from “I want this” to “I don’t want that”. “I want to win big today. I want to crush these stakes. I want to be the best”. Then after a few bad hands: “I don’t want to keep losing. I don’t want to get stuck at these stakes. I don’t want to see my bankroll drop. I don’t want this player beating me. Please, just make it stop”.

That feeling, I mean desperation to stop the pain, is a sure sign your confidence is gone. And until you understand what you’re trying to get out of, you’ll keep playing worse and worse.

A lot of players think the problem is losing. Or maybe it’s making the wrong decisions. But that’s not it. The real killer is the emotional experience — the way losing and mistakes make you feel. It’s that panic, frustration, and desperation you’re trying to escape. That’s what keeps you stuck, not the losses themselves.

A lot of players think winning money will fix their confidence. Sure, that helps — but you don’t control it. The real skill is feeling confident even when you’re losing. When your bankroll is dropping, you’re making mistakes, or others are passing you by, the key is dropping the need to escape the feeling. Instead of thinking “I gotta get out of this, I can’t feel like this”, accept the emotions: “Okay, this is how I feel. I’m still me. I can still play like me”.

When you can stay grounded in yourself through bad runs, you build genuine confidence. You remember what you really want and start playing with that in mind. Your behavior naturally follows.

I’ve learned in my career that finishing a downswing usually gives you confidence: “I survived that, I can do it again”. But why wait? You can feel confident in the middle of a downswing by prioritizing being okay with the pain and discomfort. You don’t like it? Fine. You’re here anyway. 

You don’t need to escape. Master this, and people will notice: “Why is this guy still feeling good? He doesn’t even deserve it”. It doesn’t matter if anyone thinks you deserve confidence — or even if you think you do. The only thing that matters is: do you feel it? If you do, you’ll play better. You’ll win more. 

To feel it without depending on anything else, train yourself to stay present with all the emotions as they come. It’s that simple. Most people won’t do it, but if you do, you get more money, more success, and you can feel good without needing to run hot.

Putting Confidence to Work at the Table

Confidence isn’t just a feel-good state — it directly impacts your decisions and your winnings. When you’re truly confident:

• You make better bluffs because you trust your read and your plan instead of second-guessing every move.
• You make hero calls only when your instincts and analysis line up, not out of fear or hope.
• You recover quickly from mistakes instead of letting a bad hand snowball into a downswing.
• You stay calm under pressure, which forces opponents to make mistakes instead of you.

Next time you sit down, focus less on the cards and results, more on being fully present in your confident state. The money follows naturally. Your bluffs hit more often, your hero calls pay off, and your game improves. Remember: confidence is not earned by winning. It’s a skill you can train. Master it, and the table starts working for you. So stay confident 24/7, good luck at the tables and have a productive week!