There is a common misconception about lower limits, and it is that players don’t bluff enough, so the right adjustment is to overfold.
There are situations where this is true, for example, if we are facing a tight opponent with a narrow range from early positions. This would be one of the situations that is not overbluffed, and it’s not worth bluff catching lightly.
However, when we play against wider ranges from late positions, such as BB vs. SB or BB vs. BUT, we should probably call them down more often.
Players at lower stakes won’t have good ranges and will blast off with a wide variety of hands-on different runouts, which is a great opportunity to bluff catch.
Spots to Call Them Down
As mentioned before, BB vs. SB and BB vs. BUT are the best sports to call your opponents down in as they will have the widest ranges.
If the opponent has a high VPIP number, GTO Wizard suggests VPIP between 20 and 24, with 42% open from BTN and 48.5% open from SB. If you are using HUD, you should have these numbers there. If not, you can just look at the overall VPIP, which is already integrated into HUDs on sites like GGPoker or IPoker.
When they use lines like Bet-Check-Bet and Check-Check-Bet, there is a higher probability of bluffing, as these lines are overbuffed.
When they use big sizings in spots where their range can’t have nutted hands or strong hands.
Example of Overbluffed Spot
In this spot, if BTN were to use the Bet-Check-Bet line, he would most likely include some hands that should be checked into his betting range on the river.
We can see that GTO Wizard recommends that BTN check 65% of the time with very few bluffs. His trash hands will be 50.9% of all hands he has on the river, and only 20% of them should be bluffs, which is 10% of total bluffs.
Spots to Fold More
Spots where our opponents won’t bluff as much and lines where we should overfold are UTG vs. BB and MP vs. BB.
If their range has been narrowed by 3-betting, 4-betting, and 5-betting earlier in the hand, we should consider folding more.
When their range hits the board well, and they complement it with bigger sizings, also if they are missing natural bluffs since it takes a lot of study to find unnatural bluffs.
When they play their hand face-up on boards that are dry.
Example of Bluffs Opponents Won’t Find
Here is an example of BTN having to find hard bluffs on the river against BB after double barreling and missing.
BTN has to bluff one-third of his trash hands when he gets to the river, and the most used sizing is all-in, which is a 4x pot. We can expect that if our opponent uses this sizing, he will not be bluffing with K9o, KTo, or QTo with a spade but will most likely have nutted hands. These are spots where we can fold our low EV bluff catchers and only call the best ones.
