Balancing Bluffs vs Balancing Strategy

[Jerrod Ankenman]

[ QUOTE ]
Game theory uses randomness to choose an action. This works for bluffs when your opponent doesn't see a part of your hand.

[/ QUOTE ]

The "randomizing" aspect of game theory is pretty unimportant in poker compared to the "maximizing" aspect. Many people have written about randomizing their play with their watches or whatever, but this type of thing is only a very small part of playing optimally - in fact, you generally should not randomize your bluffing by selecting some random card to bluff on. Instead, you should use card removal effects to decide what the best hands to bluff on are, and use those. The only thing that really needs to be randomized are hands that require mixed strategies, and there are quite likely to be very few of those.

[ QUOTE ]
If he gets to see the river card that you choose to bluff on (like your example in the theory of poker, but now it's holdem) he knows it is more likely you are bluffing if it's a blank than if it might have made your drawing hand. So game theory is flawed here.

[/ QUOTE ]

This is quite untrue - game theoretic strategies have a mixture of bluffs and value bets on *every* river card.

[ QUOTE ]
The same applies to strategies. Your strategy reveales itself a bit by your actions on previous streets like that rivercard revealed your bluff. I think that if you'd randomise your strategy every hand, it's very, very hard to determine that strategy for your opponents. It will probably work great for most players, but real good players might have better results by choosing their strategy by judgement of the situation/game.

[/ QUOTE ]

"Randomizing strategies"(ie playing a different strategy on each hand) isn't what we're talking about at all.

jerrod