> The natural portion of your hands to bluff with is the absolute worst ones - you don't want to bluff with your middling hands because you have some small chance of just winning a showdown when it checks around.
I don't understand this logic, can you elaborate a bit more? What do you suggest to do with middling hands then?
One very simplified model is that on the river, all your hands fall into certain buckets, from strongest to weakest. (I'm ignoring a ton of nuance here and there are actually many more buckets in a real game)
- Worth betting, because you have the best hand
- Worth calling, because your hand is good enough to beat a bluff (and maybe some value bets as well).
- Intending to fold, because your hand is bad, but maybe it's good enough to win if the opponent's hand is worse and they don't bluff.
- Worth bluffing, because your hand is so bad it can't win otherwise.
The middling hands would literally be the middle two buckets in this example. Call with the better ones, fold with the worse ones. (To complicate this more, in a real world situation the worst part of the "intending to fold" bucket might become a "planning to bluff-raise" bucket, due to similar logic as to why you bluff with your worst hands.)
Yeah but that only works in the very simplified model. In the real game you pretty much always choose bluffing hands based on card removal (the ones that makes your opponent holding a calling hand less likely).
> What do you suggest to do with middling hands then?
You try to get to a showdown. With middling hands there's a chance the opponent has a worse hand. It's when your hand is so bad your opponent has you almost certainly beat that you get to the bluffing territory, as that's the only way for you to win.
I don't understand this logic, can you elaborate a bit more? What do you suggest to do with middling hands then?