For a bluff to be successful, the player must weave a story that is believable and consistent.
Let’s go over the two Le Chiffre hands where he bluffs in Casino Royale.
The first hand
Four players going into the flop of 9-8-5, all hearts.
With 2 checks to Le Chiffre, he bets $50k and Bond immediately calls. The other two players fold.
The turn is 9 of clubs where Le Chiffre bets $100k. After a brief distraction in the shape of Eva Green’s Vesper, Bond calls the $100k and we move to the river.
The final card is a 2 of hearts. Le Chiffre bets $200k and of course, Bond calls. The reveal is a pair of 2’s completing a Full House, deuces full of nines. Bond folds his cards without revealing what he had.
For the first two bets, Le Chiffre was bluffing because his pair of 2’s is fairly weak. He didn’t complete his full house until the river which had a 4% chance of hitting, which Bond accurately states in the movie, “The odds against were 23-to-1”.
Let’s tackle that second hand.
This time, we’re already in the middle of the action with three players on the turn: J (hearts) K (spades) A (clubs) and J (diamonds)
The American, Felix Leiter bets $300k to which Bond and Le Chiffre both call. Bond casually shows the camera he’s got Ace King suited (hearts) which is a monster of a hand.
The river comes in the form of the King of diamonds, completing Bond’s full house. Felix checks and after Bond checks his cards for us again to make the audience confident in our hero’s poker skills, he bets $500k.
After Le Chiffre does his famous ‘tell’, he raises to $1M.
At this point Felix folds. After a few tense seconds of staring, Bond re-raises to $2M.
Le Chiffre responds by going all in for another $14.5M. Convinced that he’s got Le Chiffre’s bluff tell down, Bond decides to call putting himself all in.
Of course, we see the overly dramatic reveal of Le Chiffre’s winning hand of four Jacks beating Bond’s full house.
Deep dive
In the first hand, Le Chiffre was chasing for another 2 since the flop, but betting as if he already had a hand (hence the bluff). His story was consistent with someone who already had a winning hand. The bluff was a coherent story. If Bond thought Le Chiffre was bluffing on the flop, he made the right decision to call on the river. However, if Bond wasn’t sure on the flop if Le Chiffre was bluffing from the get go, he should not have called on the river.
In the second hand, we know that Le Chiffre already had the nuts by the turn but he was slow playing his hand. By merely calling and luring out the 5th card, the only way he could have lost was if Bond was holding pocket kings.
Tells-aside, if Le Chiffre was bluffing on his raise to $1M, the story must be that he’s hit trip King, four Kings. Without context to the rest of the hands and how Le Chiffre plays, we have to eliminate the possibility that Bond thinks Le Chiffre is slow playing on the turn. Slow playing on the turn and then bluffing on the river is inconsistent!
Obviously Bond was lured in because of his arrogance and the scene plays out beautifully because of it.
So remember, for a true successful bluff, the story needs to be consistent. if the story being told doesn’t make sense… it’s not a bluff, but something else.