Hey everyone! There seems to be a lot of confusion in general about bluffing/calling the river with hands that block the missed flush draw. So I'll share some ideas that I've gleaned from looking at various solver outputs--specifically in the triple barrel lines.

1. When triple barreling as the aggressor, we (usually) don't want to block the missed flushdraw.
This is the one that most people are familiar with. The defender is calling twice with lots of flushdraws, most of which are folding the river. Blocking these hands decreases our opponent's folding frequency, which is bad when we are bluffing.

That said, this is not a hard and fast rule. Solvers don't mind bluffing the river with low flushdraws sometimes, in spots where our opponent mostly has high flushdraws. This often happens when the defender is out of position and facing a large overbet on the turn.

2. As the caller facing a 3 barrel, we (usually) prefer having a flushdraw blocker.
This follows logically from (1). It is somewhat opponent dependent though: if your opponent is bad enough to bluff with most of his missed flushdraws, then it can certainly be bad to have the blocker. But it's safe to say that most good players should be giving up the majority of their missed flushdraws, making it good to have the flush blocker.

As with (1), the rank of the flush blocker matters as well. The nut blocker usually adds more EV to your bluffcatcher, because from the aggressor's perspective, the nut flushdraw is the hand that blocks the most folds. Whereas a low flush blocker might be neutral or even -EV.

As a final note, remember that frequency is always more important than blocker effects. If you're facing a 3x pot overbet, having bottom pair with an Ad kicker is not an excuse to mash call when diamonds miss. Yes your hand will probably be close to 0EV in theory, but you lose a ton of EV in practice if villain isn't bluffing enough. Overall calling/bluffing frequency > blockers always.

For a more visual explanation as well as some examples, you can check out this 3min video that I did:

Very good video.

(Not an expert advice) I think yt algorithm pushes either 8min+ videos or really short under 1min. There is also new video format called YT shorts for those super short videos. Maybe 4min is not gto time length.

Yeah, this works a lot of the time.

There are also spots where It works the other way around though, which is where all the confusion starts

I think a much better method that applies to every river spot is stop thinking in terms of general heuristics like "should I bluff missed flush draws or not" and instead start focusing on individual combos your opponent can have and how each one of your individual cards blocks or unblocks folds/calls; every situation is different

Yeah usually those are the spots where the caller doesn't have many missed flush draws (having folded most of them on the turn), and/or has lots of offsuit bluffcatchers with a flush blocker that will call down at some frequency.

It's probably best to do something in between, without some heuristics the decision making process would be way too complicated, but it's obviously not good to be blindly following these heuristics either.

Ironically what you described is the correct generalized heuristic for bluffing and the reason focusing in on missed flush draws doesn't work is precisely because such a heuristic doesn't generalize.

When you say that it is 'good' for us to have the flush blocker vs a good player that will not bluff his missed flush draws, do you mean it's good because we can correctly fold and lose the pot but also not lose much sleep over it because our fold is likely to be decent?

Because if we have the flush blocker, then our opponent is less likely to have the flush draw, and he likely wouldn't be betting the missed flush draw anyway, yet he is still betting as we are facing a bet, therefore it must be for value and so we need to fold? If so, then maybe this is bad for us to have the blocker as we are needing to fold more and lose the pot?

If we are against a bad player that will bluff all of his missed flush draws then having the blocker means we should fold more, meaning it's bad for us to block flush draws?

Also, why do good players not bluff their missed flush draws?

I just think there is something a bit contradictory with what you have said and that is why I am asking these kind of circular questions. Please can you start again with this and clarify everything.

As an aside, before reading this thread, my own thoughts on this were:

When it comes to calling on the river after the flush gets there, I think it is good to have a blocker as you block some combos of flushes that your opponent can have.

Therefore if that is true, when the flush doesn't get there, you don't want to have a blocker surely, so that you allow your opponent to have as many flush draw combos as possible.

I never thought of a player being 'good' or 'bad' when thinking of whether they would bluff missed flush draws or not, I thought that many player types could/would do this.

Heeere he comes

Do I make some good points this time?

I really recommend watching the video, it's 3mins long and answers pretty much all of your questions. If you still have doubts after that I'd be happy to answer them of course.

Your video brings up even more questions.

For example, you say our opponent if IP and facing a small bet means he can call more flush draws profitably even if he loses the pot 100% of the time when he doesn't get there. Therefore he can just over-fold on the river to us as he has already locked in that profit right? So us making him overfold on the river doesn't matter as he already played profitably against us with those combos on an earlier street. Perhaps this was our mistake by betting too small on the turn, and so we think we are playing the river well as our opponent is folding to us loads, but only because we messed the turn up, so it is a hollow victory in reality.

I believe it was aner0 that mentioned that once profit is locked in by our opponent, we can't get that profit back on a later street, our opponent already has his EV.

So therefore your river strategy becomes moot if our opponent played all of his combos correctly and profitably on the turn. Again, that is if aner0 is correct of course, which he may well be.

I'm not sure where you heard me say that, a big part of villain's ev definitely comes from being allowed to bluff profitably when we check river.