I am not confident with my understanding of what this means.
I think it is maybe when you have say A-high on the turn, you check behind so that if your ace does hit on the river, you can feel comfortable calling a medium sized bet, compared to having to call a larger bet if you had "inflated" the pot with a bluff on the turn?
Your question is a bit too vague and it depends on the situation.
You shouldn't bet on any flop without a reason to. Do you want to make your opponent fold? Are you semi-bluffing? Do you have enough odds/outs to make that bet?
Post an example and maybe we can help.
I don't really have an example, it is written in the strategy articles as one of the rules of bluffing.
Do not inflate the pot with bluffs.
I just don't know what this means.
Yeah I wondered about this as well.
Surely if you are going to bluff, and bet is going to inflate the pot?
Maybe it refers to only bluffing if your opponent can fold, so then the pot won't actually get any bigger?
I think it means dont put too much money and commit urself to the pot when you are bluffing.
Like if you have pu 75% of your BR in the bluff it is highly probable that you will use the 25% remaining to see the show down as you already commit yourself.
Or it means bluff wisely don't put excess amount of money in da bluff man ~
Potentially it may be referring to bluffing into a dead pot. eg. one person all in, you and villain still have chips left, no point bluffing into a dead pot.
With a semi bluff I think often you do want to be 'inflating' the pot since a) a bigger bet gives you more fold equity, and thus a better chance of winning the pot there and then, and b) if your opponent calls and you hit your outs, you win a much bigger pot, yet also easily can fold to them when you miss and c) balances out your value bets so it is harder for your opponent to discern whether or not you are betting to get value or to induce a fold in any given hand.
It doesn't really matter exactly what it means, catakliss is right, instead of thinking "Never do x" type things (which are easy to avoid huge mistakes when you are inexperienced) its better to think along the lines of "why am I making this bet, what do I expect to happen as a result of this?"
