• Poker Bluffing Frequency Calculator
• Poker Bluffing Frequency Definition

Which poker stats are most important?

The first paragraph is stating that you will win as often as your opponent bluffs. Strong players tend to give you pot odds that are close to their bluffing frequency. This is not always the case, but not a bad rule to keep in mind. Also notice the key word 'if' in the 3rd sentence. There is no set optimum frequency for bluffing that covers every situation. It would be awesome if I could tell you that you should bluff once every 10 hands or something to that effect, but there are no hard or fast rules in poker. When should you bluff in poker? You should bluff when you think you can get your opponent to fold. The optimal frequency for doing so is just as Sklansky described in his article. On the river, Hero can bluff half as many hands as he has combos of the nuts (the nuts here referring to any hand with 100% equity against Villain’s bluff-catching range).

Our poker HUD software offers a large amount of statistics. Knowing which ones are relevant and important can be overwhelming. If you are new to poker software you can initially ignore all statistics except the essential three poker statistics. Once you have understood how to use the basic statistics, you can add more depending on your style of play, and your chosen table size.

The big three poker statistics (and one bonus stat):

• Voluntarily Put $ in Pot (VPIP)
• Preflop Raise (PFR)
• Postflop Aggression Frequency (Agg)
• A bonus stat: Big blinds won/100 hands.

These three statistics are a great starting point to get an idea of a person’s playing style. They only require 25 hands or so to reliably give a good idea of a player's tendencies.

Joe is an instructor at the Poker Training site GrinderSchool.com which focuses on providing affordable training targeted at small stakes and microstakes games. Joe has strong background in NLHE Cash Games, with a focus on the quick thought processes required to dominate at 6-max Rush Poker. Bluffing is the ‘sexy’ part of poker. The game of poker is a card game played among two or more players for several rounds. There are several varieties of the game, but they all tend to have these aspects in common: The game begins with each player putting down money allocated for betting. During each round of play, players are dealt cards from a standard 52-card deck, and the goal of each player is to have the best 5-card hand at.

Voluntarily Put $ in Pot (VPIP)

VPIP in poker measures how often you voluntarily pay money into a hand before seeing the flop. Paying the big blind, the small blind, or the ante is not considered voluntary. Therefore this percentage indicates how often you called, bet, or raised. The lower this value, the tighter your hand selection is. The higher, the looser. Only preflop betting is taken into account.

Good players know to only invest money in the pot when they have decent starting hands. A simple way to measure whether you are doing this is to keep your VPIP at a sensible value.

What is a good number for VPIP?

Simple answer: between 15% and 20%. This assumes you want to play tightly, you are playing micro-stakes, and you are playing on full ring cash tables.

Now the more complicated answer: it depends a lot. If you are still learning to play good poker, then you should be very selective in which hands you play, so your VPIP might acceptably be a tad lower than 15%. The less people on the table, the more hands you can play. If you are on a table full of ultralight players, you can also loosen up. An experienced player who understands the subtleties of the game can get away with a VPIP between 20% and 27%. In 6-max or heads-up, most players have a much higher VPIP. In Pot Limit Omaha, VPIP values will be even higher.

Preflop Raise (PFR)

The PFR statistic indicates how often you have raised before the flop is seen. A high value is an indicator of an aggressive player. A low value indicates a passive player. Good players are aggressive players.

Your PFR has a possible range between a minumum of 0% and a maximum equal to the value of your VPIP. That is, if your VPIP is 20%, then your PFR can’t be higher than 20%. Ideally it should be a little lower than your VPIP, but not much lower.

Poor players and beginners play timidly. They call too often preflop. Good players frequently fold or raise preflop, especially if no other players have yet raised. If you are not prepared to raise, then you should consider folding. Calling preflop just in case the flop is good for you is not a winning poker strategy.

What is a good PFR range?

Between 2% and 3% lower than VPIP. If your VPIP is 15%, PFR should be about 12%. These two numbers in combination indicate that you are only playing quality hole cards, and you are predominantly raising with them pre-flop. In other words, you are playing how most poker books and poker forums say you should play.

Postflop Aggression Frequency (Agg)

Agg indicates how aggressively you play postflop. The higher this number, the more aggressively you are playing. This must be interpreted in combination with VPIP. Players who see very few flops will naturally tend to have a higher aggression percentage because they are only playing top-quality hole cards.

Poor players play passively postflop. They’ll check or call too often. Good players know to play good hands aggressively postflop:

• because players with speculative hands are forced to fold before they get free cards
• because if they hit the flop or have a dominating hand, a bet or raise will increase their return

What is a good Agg range?

50% to 60% is ideal, assuming that you have a VPIP of 15% to 20%. Much higher, and you are probably overplaying speculative hands and bad hands, and bluffing too much. Much lower and you are not playing your good hands strongly postflop.

Leave the bluffing for the movies and for live play. At low stakes online play, bluffing is much less important than a good understanding of the probabilities of winning hands.

Big blinds won/100 hands

The three stats I've presented so far mean nothing if you can't keep your win rate positive. A nice way to 'normalize' your win rate across different stake levels, table sizes, and opponents is to measure how much you won in terms of the big blind. If you are playing at a table where the big blind is $0.50, and you won $20, then think of this as winning 40 big blinds.

If this number is not positive, then you are losing money. The best remedy is to drop to a lower stake level, where the opponents are weaker. If, according to this stat, you consistently win over time, then you should consider going up to a higher stake level.

Adjusting your play based on the villain's poker stats

This is where our poker HUD software gets really useful: analyzing and exploiting opponent weaknesses. Let's consider some hypothetical players:

Tight Tim has VPIP of 5%, PFR of 5%, and Agg of 100%

With such a low VPIP, we can guess that this player folds anything except the very best hands. And with a PFR equal to VPIP, when he gets premium hands, he raises. So if this player raises, and you are next to act, you know that you should fold every hand except the best few hands, such as AA, KK, QQ. You can be almost certain that if you go to the flop, he'll raise postflop. So play tighter than usual with this player. But when you do get a premium hand, and he comes along, you can be sure that player B will put plenty of chips into the pot. Your pot, hopefully.

Passive Pete has VPIP of 20%, PFR of 16%, and Agg of 10%.

This player seems take have a good handle on preflop play. But when he gets to the flop, he gets timid. He is probably going to give you a chance postflop to see the turn and river for free. If you go to the flop with him and raise, there is a good chance he'll fold. So you can play a bit more aggressively both preflop and postflop.

Eddie the Eagle has VPIP of 22%, PFR of 19%, and Agg of 55%.

Eddie has a good all-round balance between preflop and postflop play. Preflop, he plays tight and aggressively. Postflop, he balances between pushing hard with his good hands, and being willing to fold or check with his weaker hands. Eddie would be well-served to move on to understanding more advanced poker statistics.

Tracking your poker stats

Poker players use poker software like Poker Copilot to automatically record their hands. Each hand is broken down into many statistics, which are then aggregated into simple percentages.

Poker Statistics Guide

What’s next after you’ve understood the basic poker stats? Read our Poker Statistics Guide for a comprehensive explanation of understanding and using all the main poker statistics.

Bluffing – for the “layman”, it’s probably one of the first words that pop into their heads when they hear about poker. And in a certain way, they’re right to make that association.

See, bluffing is an essential tool to overrealise your equity in poker.

“Overrealising equity” is just a posh way of saying ‘win the pot more often with your hand than it would win if it went to showdown each hand’.

Let’s say you have KQ off-suit in middle position and you open, and a good reg calls in the cutoff. If we give them a reasonable calling range, you have about little over 52% equity going to the flop.

If you manage to win the pot more often than that, you have successfully overrealised your equity.

It is incredibly important to be able to do that, since that’s what makes or breaks a good poker player.

If you aren’t able to do that, then you are at the mercy of the deck. At that point, based on the assumption that other people are going to bluff you from time-to-time, are you really better off than just playing a slot machine or buying a scratch-off lottery ticket?

Two Ways of Achieving Equity Overrealisation

Poker Bluffing Frequency Calculator

One is called “the blue line”, or “the showdown line”: this is when you make your opponent put more money into the pot with a worse hand by value betting intelligently. The naming of the lines come from HUD reports.

Poker Bluffing Frequency Definition

The other is called “the red line” or the “no showdown line”: this is when you make your opponent fold a better hand by bluffing well.

This time, we’ll be examining bluffing and, more specifically, how often it should be done.

First off, when discussing bluffing, we need to be familiar with another poker term: fold equity.

Fold Equity

Fold equity is the percentage of time your opponent is going to fold their hand to a bet or raise. Unlike “regular” equity, it can’t be calculated using combinatorics; it’s something very specific to poker strategy.

You need to take your opponent’s whole range and see what hands are there that they would be willing to let go of.

Let’s take another example: you open KQ suited from the middle position, and a good reg calls in the cutoff.

The flop comes 76A, two hearts. You’re out of position, the action is on you – however, you are the pre-flop aggressor. Should you take a stab? Now, you have to think about how those cards connect with the reg’s range.

Part of the reg’s possible hands are Aces with middling kickers and suited Aces with low kickers – it’s unlikely they’re going to fold either of those. If they made a set of 6’s or 7’s, evidently there’s no chance they’re folding either.

Flush draws are also going to call any reasonably sized bet, and if he happens to have 98 suited, so are the opened ended straight draws.

On the other hand, if they just have two broadway cards (KJ, QJ, QT) or a suited connector that missed (T9 suited, not of diamonds only has a gutshot) or a pocket pair that did not make a set and would be afraid of the Ace on the board, your bet is likely going to get through.

Keep in mind though that you are blocking some of the broadway card combos since you are holding KQ yourself.

You need to evaluate what percentage of their range is the above mentioned folding range in order to determine through EV calculations whether or not your bluff is profitable on the long run.

However, for this piece, we want to focus on general truths about over bluffing frequencies rather than specific hands.

These few paragraphs were just to make sure to cover the basic theories behind bluffing before diving into how often you should be making these moves.

The right bluffing frequency varies from street to street.

As a rule of thumb, you can bluff more frequently on earlier streets because you can improve your hand therefore you have extra equity in addition to your fold equity – that is unless you’re drawing dead — which is impossible pre-flop, the only street where that is the case. Even 7-2 off has 10-12% chance against Aces, depending on the suits.

This is noteworthy since the correct value bet to bluff ratio calculations are based on pot odds.

The assumption is whenever you bluff, you’ll win the pot 0% of the time if you get called; whenever you value bet you’ll win the pot 100% time if you get called.

Evidently, it’s not as clear-cut in actual poker games, especially the value betting part of that assumption is often far from the reality, every poker player value bets with a worse hand from time to time – however, this is a GTO calculation, not a real game of poker.

On earlier streets, even when caught bluffing, you’ll still improve to a better hand some percentage of the time, that is why – as we mentioned earlier – you can profitably bluff more often early in the hand.

So, the numbers below assume 0% raw equity – this usually means the river when you have no made hand.

All of these are based on the pot odds you’re giving your opponent with your bet. The idea is if you bluff this often in proportion to your value bets, they don’t have an edge against you when deciding between a call and a fold.

Let’s say the pot is $100, you bet $50, half pot bet. Now, if you bluff 50% of the time your opponent can call every time and make a profit.

Here’s how it’s calculated: he’s paying $50 to win a pot that is going to be $150 (not including his $50 call which should not be included in the profit for the calculation); and – once again, assuming that every time you value bet and get called they lose – they’re going to win that pot 50% of the time. That means that on the long run he’s making (0.5X$150)-(0.5X$50)=$50 if he calls you.

However, if you bluff with the correct frequency, 25% of the time, your opponent still has to put in $50 to win a $200 pot, but he’ll only win 25% of the time. This means, using the same type of expected value calculation: (0.25X$150)+(0.75X-s$50)=0. He’s not winning or losing, he’s exactly breaking even.

This means that your bluffing frequency isn’t an indicator for your opponent when they’re about to make their call – and as a good, balanced player that is what you should strive for.

Also, this kind of thinking implies that the other player is also highly competent. You can’t expect casual online micro stakes players that play against you for the first time to really analyze your river half pot bet tendencies.

For lower stakes players, this is more of a guideline to have some bluffs in their range, but not too many.

Although please note that all these calculations alone do not tell you how often you’re betting as a whole.

These are just ratios. Ratios can stay the same if you bet 100% of your range in the river or if you only bet 10%. The key is if you value bet often, you also need to keep your bluffs proportionate as well.

Evidently, if you you’re not an aggressive player and value bet less, you need to bluff less often too in order to remain unexploitable.

This post was written by Marton Magyar, the Beating Betting poker strategy contributer. Marton has also written for sites like HighStakesDB and PokerTube.

Feature image source: Flickr