Furthermore, by making plays such as this, you will greatly increase your winnings on your big hands. Many players, not realizing the essential soundness of your play, will mark you as a big bluffer when you expose a hand like this in the showdown in one of your losing automatic bluffs. They may even raise after the draw on some later hand, holding only moderate values themselves! Or, at the very least, they will tend to call you after the draw when you have made your hand and they have only moderate values.

It is important to understand the basic principles behind this automatic bluff, so that you do not apply the technique improperly. There are two crucial factors which lead to an automatic bluff situation. The first is that your hand after the draw must be essentially hopeless! It is a paradoxical part of lowball-probably the strangest of all poker games, anyway-that after the draw you must bet with either a very good hand or a very bad hand! The reason is that if your hand is not a sure loser you can always hope to win on a check-out after the draw.

Thus, if you had drawn a jack in the example hand, there would be about a 50% chance that your hand would then be better than your opponent's! The second factor is that the pot must offer suitable odds. If there is little money in the pot, say only two or three times the amount you risk with the automatic bluff, then the play will be a big loser in the long run. For now your opponent need call you only about two times in three to hold you even, and he may well do that even though his own odds are correspondingly shorter. Using the amount in the pot as a basis for calculation has been described in great detail previously, so nothing more need be said on this subject.