When it comes to bluffing in poker there is a right way and a wrong way to do it. The trick is to use common sense but, strangely, a lot of people just don’t seem to do that.

One of the biggest mistakes in the bluffing book is to go all in, or raise almost all of your chips, without taking anything else into consideration. In this no-no move, the player doesn’t think about his position, the cards in his own hand, the cards that have been dealt, his opponents or anything else. He simply goes all in, in an attempt to scare the other players into folding.

You may ask yourself what’s so wrong with that? And the truth is that sometimes this move works. In a No-Limit game you’ll be hard-pressed to find a player who will use a major chunk of their stack to call your huge bluff. However, if you do it too often the other players will begin to catch on and you could wind up losing your entire poker bankroll in one fell swoop.

In lower limit games with pot limits of $10/$20 this radical bluff is an even worse idea. A $20 bluff will nearly always be called by at least one other player at the table and since you haven’t put any thought into your actions there’s a 50/50 chance you’ll lose. Bluffing is a skill that takes practices in free poker and requires strategy and analysis. Going in blind will only hurt you in the long run.