Editing Bluff (poker) (section)

== Bluffing in other games ==
Although bluffing is most often considered a poker term, similar tactics are useful in other games as well. In these situations, a player makes a play that should not be profitable unless an opponent misjudges it as being made from a position capable of justifying it. Since a successful bluff requires deceiving one's opponent, it occurs only in games in which the players conceal information from each other. In games like chess and backgammon, both players can see the same board and so should simply make the best legal move available. Examples include:

* [[Contract Bridge]]: [[Psychic bid]]s and [[Glossary of contract bridge terms#F|falsecards]] are attempts to mislead the opponents about the distribution of the cards. A risk (common to all bluffing in partnership games) is that a bluff may also confuse the bluffer's partner. Psychic bids serve to make it harder for the opponents to find a good contract or to accurately place the key missing cards with a defender. Falsecarding (a tactic available in most trick taking card games) is playing a card that would naturally be played from a different hand distribution in hopes that an opponent will wrongly assume that the falsecarder made a natural play from a different hand and misplay a later trick on that assumption.
* [[Stratego]]: Much of the strategy in Stratego revolves around identifying the ranks of the opposing pieces. Therefore, depriving your opponent of this information is valuable. In particular, the "[[Shoreline Bluff]]" involves placing the flag in an unnecessarily-vulnerable location in the hope that the opponent will not look for it there. It is also common to bluff an attack that one would never actually make by initiating pursuit of a piece known to be strong, with an as-yet unidentified but weaker piece. Until the true rank of the pursuing piece is revealed, the player with the stronger piece might retreat if their opponent does not pursue them with a weaker piece. That might buy time for the bluffer to bring in a faraway piece that can actually defend against the bluffed piece.
* [[Spades (card game)|Spades]]: In late game situations, it is useful to bid a nil even if it cannot succeed.<ref>[http://masterspades.home.att.net/stout3.htm]  {{webarchive |url=https://web.archive.org/web/20091228090152/http://masterspades.home.att.net/stout3.htm |date=December 28, 2009 }}</ref> If the third seat bidder sees that making a natural bid would allow the fourth seat bidder to make an uncontestable bid for game, they may bid nil even if it has no chance of success. The last bidder then must choose whether to make their natural bid (and lose the game if the nil succeeds) or to respect the nil by making a riskier bid that allows their side to win even if the doomed nil is successful. If the player chooses wrong and both teams miss their bids, the game continues.
* [[Scrabble]]: Scrabble players will sometimes deliberately play an invalid "phony" word in the hope the opponent does not challenge it, and allows them to score for it. Bluffing in Scrabble is a bit different from the other examples. Scrabble players conceal their tiles but have little opportunity to make significant deductions about their opponent's tiles (except in the endgame) and even less opportunity to spread disinformation about them. Bluffing by playing a phony is instead based on assuming players have imperfect knowledge of the acceptable word list.{{citation needed|date=March 2020}}