Originally Posted by dsaxton
I think it's probably a question of how much "marginal equity" a bet has. That is, how much equity is added by getting him to fold the better hand, since my hand is already good a decent percentage of the time here.
If you were to assess the profitability of a bet like this, I think you would have to determine the probability that he holds a better hand, multiply this by the probability that he folds it and then multiply this number by the pot size. That would basically be what I expect to win by betting. That amount is probably too small for this bet to have positive expectation, since my hand is good so often, and yet too marginal for a worse hand to ever call.
I think you could probably generalize this for bluffing in general, except in the case of most bluffs, the probabily that your opponent is holding the best hand is much higher.
Thoughts?