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Review of The Book of Bluffs

The Book of Bluffs, by Matt Lessinger, is a rare kind of poker book. Rather than discuss poker in general, or a specific form of poker in a general way, it describes in great detail a particular aspect of poker. Probably the first book to do this is The Book of Tells by Mike Caro, which this book is named after. Of course, the specific element in question is bluffing.

The foreword
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The foreword was written by Mike Caro. Mike has always been my favorite poker writer because his writings, even when they have no earth-shattering strategic wisdom, are usually very insightful and well-written. Caro’s strength is telling you the obvious in a way you never really thought about before, and here he does it again. It’s a perfect beginning to the book, as it demonstrates perfectly how bluffing is, in a sense, the foundation of poker.

I know it may seem unusual for me to critique the foreword. However, it was the first thing I read when I picked up the book, and it convinced me it’s a keeper. The rest of the book does not disappoint.

Games
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Almost all of the bluffs described are for hold’em, because this is the most common form of poker. There are 49 bluff examples, including 23 limit hold’em hands, 18 no-limit hold’em hands, two pot-limit hold’em hands, two pot-limit Omaha high hands, and four seven-card stud hands. Some of the hands took place in tournaments, including the WSOP main event, but most were from cash games. Some of the bluffs are specific to particular games, but others are general poker bluffs that just happened to occur in a game of a certain type.

Famous bluffs
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A few of the included bluffs are famous, for example, the bluff Jack Straus pulled with 72 offsuit in a big cash game, or the big bluff that Bobby Baldwin pulled on Crandell Addington that turned the tide of the 1978 WSOP. However, most of the bluffs in the book are fairly ordinary bluffs made by ordinary mortals, but then, you don’t need to be a world-class player to beat a table of fish. Let the big boys do the really fancy stuff. I think the balance struck here, between practical application of bluffs in everyday games to what can be done with bluffs in world-class competition, is handled very well.

Book organization
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The book is very well-organized, categorizing the bluffs by their purpose: Attacking Weakness (further divided into attacking made hands and drawing hands), Representing Strength, and The Implied Threat are the three major areas of interest, but the other chapters such as Online Bluffs and Bail-Out Bluffs make for good reading, too.

The book’s final chapter includes some WSOP bluffs and a few interviews. The bluffs with interviews are Bobby Baldwin vs. Crandell Addington, Stu Ungar vs. Ron Stanley, and Chris Moneymaker vs. Sammy Farha. The author interviewed each of these players individually, except Sammy Farha declined to be interviewed and the late Stu Ungar had to be replaced by Nolan Dalla, co-author of Stu’s autobiography. Addington’s interview is particularly insightful.

My favorite bit
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I’m not going to attempt a section-by-section analysis of the book, because one section is more or less like any other in the way the material is presented; the only difference is what material, and I can say it’s all good. Instead, I will simply quote my favorite bit from the book. It discusses a caveat about semi-bluffing that is often not discussed.

“Let’s say you semi-bluff a straight draw and it gets there on the river. Now you bet your straight, and your opponent calls. On the one hand, you’ll win the pot. On the other hand, you’ll know that as a bluff, your play was a failure. If you hadn’t made your hand, your opponent would have called and you would have lost. Winning the pot is a misleading result. Players usually pat themselves on the back for winning with their semi-bluff, but they are missing the key point. It was a bluff. As such, you’re supposed to pick situations in which your opponents are too weak to call. Since your opponent called, you clearly read the situation incorrectly. He was stronger than you thought. It’s OK to be happy that you won the pot, as long as you are also critical of your play. Try to figure out why your opponent paid you off, and what you could have done differently to get him to fold if you had missed.

“Conversely, let’s say you make your straight, you bet it, and your opponent folds. You might argue that you wanted to get paid off, but is that really true? Sure, you lost an extra bet, but you can take comfort in the fact that you picked the right time to bluff. It was irrelevant that you made your straight. Unless your opponent somehow detected that you made a hand on the end, his fold tells you that your river bet would have won the hand regardless. As a bluffer, that gives you reason to be proud. You didn’t need to fall back on your possible outs. Whether you had a straight or pure garbage, the pot was yours. That is the result you are striving for.”

I was surprised to learn that, from a bluffing perspective, your semi-bluff has failed when you hit and your opponent calls. That doesn’t mean it was a bad idea, of course; bluffing with outs does have more EV than bluffing without outs — but it is still a bluff first and foremost. The highest EV would be having your opponent fold each time, right? You can’t lose a pot when your opponent folds — and he may be folding when he’s ahead!

One problem
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I have only one problem with the book. In limit poker, bluffing is often wrong. It becomes correct more often in shorthanded games, but even then it is difficult to pick your spots correctly. I know I can’t pick my spots very well… one reason I bought the book in the first place. The book does sometimes indicate where a bluff is improper, but I think it does not stress the point enough for limit poker. Nevertheless, I think it is a great book, and I think it significantly changed my perception of the game. I think I’ll read through it again — and again — to properly etch its principles into my mind…

Conclusion
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“Are you finishing up already?” you ask. Well, I know I didn’t write as much about this book as I’ve written about others. The problem is I really can’t go into that much depth about it without just quoting the book, and I’ve done that once already. Suffice it to say it is dense with ideas in each chapter, and it would be pointless of me to try to critique them all. It was not published by 2+2, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Sklansky and Malmuth wished it were.

This book is no Super/System, or Theory of Poker, or any of the standard reference works. It does not try to be. Instead of replacing any poker book, it is a book that belongs on the shelf with all the others. What are you waiting for? Go get it for that bookshelf!

Focus: 10/10
Perfect.

Quality of advice: 9/10
Made me see a few things in ways I hadn’t thought about before. The only problem is that it doesn’t emphasize quite enough when not to bluff, though it doesn’t ignore that subject, either.

Examples: 10/10
Each bluff is given a perfect example with plenty of explanation.

Readability: 10/10
When I was reading through it from beginning to end, I sometimes had trouble putting it down.

Appropriateness: 10/10
Perfect for the task it sets out to do.

Overall (not an average): 10/10
No, I am not sleeping with the author. I promise.

VERDICT: The PERFECT book to study the subject of bluffing!

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