Showing bluffs

I was reminded in a tournament last night how showing your hand after a bluff can be a double edged sword.

The idea, of course, by showing a bluff, is twofold:

1. Put other players on tilt so that their decision making is poorer.
2. Lower a players range against you so that when you do hit they will call your big bets on second pair or lower.

The trouble with showing a bluff is that you are giving the other players free information, whether you may realize it or not, they are not just looking at the cards you bluffed with, they are also looking at what your preflop bet was, how you played through the streets, whether it was a three bullet bluff or a call to the river check raise bluff.

After a few hands go by, the player then may get a hit, a strong hand. But rarely, despite best intentions, do they bet exactly the same. Their bets on the streets might not be so large as to price people in, their river bet may be slightly lower as not to scare you away. Even their preflop bet might be altered slightly to make a call more tempting.

Usually, the player that shows bluffs play their hits differently in some way.

And when a player who habitually shows bluffs suddenly doesn't show when someone folds, you can be reasonably sure that was a hit.

The core point of this is not a specific countering strategy, but instead look at the general concept of giving more information than you have to. IF you are an expert player who has a history of succesfully manipulating players using this strategy, then of course, continue.

In a tournament last night a player showed three bluffs within 15 or so hands, and then didn't show after winning one. A quick look at the history showed the classic "bet big when I want you out of the pot and bet little when I want you in" pattern and I was able to exploit this twice. First getting out of a hand he bet small on on the flop, then calling huge bullets on my top pair second kicker a couple of hands later.

He/She may have been wondering how I could call their huge bets after just folding to smaller bets. Its simple, because they showed their bluffs I had an immediate starting point to detecting bluff vs nuts holdings.

Detecting when a player is bluffing verses having strong holdings is a key component of poker strategy. Why give anyone a shortcut to gaining this information?