I'm going to disagree because bluffing at 1/2 in general is lighting money on fire. Add up all the bluffs you've made at 1/2 and I bet you are down overall. You don't have to win every hand, it's ok to give up a $30 pot. Floating flop to raise turn is probably massively -EV when V double barrels OOP at 1/2

Yeah, honestly, I just can't stand that statement, because it is literally useless, actually worse than useless, since if taken seriously, this line of thinking will hurt people's long term earn rate.

That said, it wouldn't take much tweaking, to make your claim accurate/useful. I would go with this:

There are still plenty of spots in 1-2 where bluffing will be +EV. There's still lots of players trying to play well that we can exploit with proper calculated aggression, lots of players that have huge bet-sizing tells signalling a bet/folding line, and lots of spots where we can attack wide ranges against players that can make "good" folds.

Now I've played in some of the weakest 1-2 games in the world (Motor City casino in Detroit). And while it is often the case that I can go 3-4 sessions without ever finding a spot to run a profitable bluff, during the course of a month, profitable bluffing spots will come up often enough to add a decent chunk to our hourly rate. Now in Vegas, and by Vegas I really mean the Venetian, cuz that's where I usually play, even more profitable bluffing spots come up because although these games are soft, they're not nearly as soft as Detroit games. And what I've noticed is most of the profitable bluffing spots that come up in 1-2 are usually spots where our story is highly suspect, spots where a good hand reader would smell bull****, but it doesn't matter because the targeted victim will not be one of those savvy hand readers.


Actually my major problem at 1-2 is that my bluffs are TOO successful. I'm not losing with style often enough. I choose my victims carefully (young white kids trying to play well are my favorite victims) and I choose my spots carefully (when I'm nearly sure villain's range is very wide), and I always have that tight nitty straight forward image backing me up. I know that there's a lot of more marginal bluffs with lower success rates but nonetheless profitable, that I'm still not seeing. Most of the bluffs I run I would call softball bluffs--obviously very profitable bluffs.

IMO, raising the turn here is one of those softball bluffs, but I'll admit there's some incomplete information here that makes the bluff a tad shaky, but I would still run it with a clean image.

Look at the situation. Guy doesn't like us raising preflop, then he donks a paired board. We both know that he's unlikely to have a J in this spot. Then he bets a tad less than half pot on the turn (this is the shaky part, I wish we had more information about villain's bet sizing tendencies, but hey most bluffs aren't gonna be perfect), which at the very least I take as a sign that the villain is probably not that strong here. We get the nut bluffing card on the turn. It's a scary overcard that hits our perceived range and it gives us 8 outs to a strong hand thus significantly lowering the FE we need to make this bluff raise profitable. So yeah, I highly suspect this bluff is profitable, so I'm going for it. This bluff would be practically perfect if we had that nice bet-sizing tell, but at least going off general background assumptions villain's bet-sizing isn't that scary. But like I said before, we don't need everything thing aligned for a bluff to be profitable. We have enough to go for it here, and I think this should be a standard bluff in anyone's arsenal.

EDIT: Just re-read the OP, and he said he has shown some bluffs. Godamnit, that complicates matters. Without a clean image I REALLY want things to be near perfect to run a bluff. No clean image = I wanna know what villain's turn bet-sizing means before I make a play. Clean image = Theres enough other variables in place where I'm willing to go for it without that knowledge.

This is why I hate when people show bluffs.

I feel like you're taking this down very often with a flop raise, and not often enough with a river raise.