No more cards are coming.
After the dealer would have put the river card on the board, your hand would be complete.
At this point, you might have a big poker hand (such as a full hous or flush), a decent poker hands (such as top pair or an overpair to the board), or a missed poker hand (such as a busted straight draw).
If you were to feel you have the winner, you would typically have to bet when the action would get to you. If you would be unsure whether your hand was best, you would have the alternative of either checking and hoping for the best in a showdown or checking with the purpose of calling someone else’s bet.
Bluffs Rare Succeed in Low-Limit Games
When you were to miss your hand, you could be tempted to take a stab at the pot by bluffing. A word of caution, however: Bluffing would seldom succeed in low-limit holdem poker. With numerous bets in the pot, it would cost you only one bet to attempt a bluff. This would give you a good price.
(The pot could be laying you odds of ten-to-one or better, which would mean your bluff would need to succeed only a small percentage of the time to be a profitable play.) Nonetheless, in loose low-limit poker games, even ten-to-one or better odds could not be enough to justify attempting a bluff, as someone would call you nearly every time.
A Good Bluffing Situation
One situation would subsist in which a bluff would be more apt to be successful, however, and if you were to integrate this play into your game it should increase your profits. Particularly, a good time to bluff would be when you were against only one or two poker rivals, and a scare card* were to comes on the river.
For instance, suppose you were to have been calling the whole way with a flush draw. The board was to show: a five, a six, a jack, a seven, and an eight now, any four or nine would make a straight, and if you were to bet out with confidence when the eight were to hit, your bluff would have a realistic chance of success. It wouldn’t work every time, but would succeed often enough to be a lucrative play.
It wouldn’t have to work even most of the time. It would just have to work more than the pot odds would signify. For instance, if the pot was to have five big bets and your bluff was to succeed more than one-sixth of the time, you would profit. Out of six times the situation would come up, say you were to lose one bet five times out of six, which would be a loss of five bets.
One time you would win the pot, because your poker opponents would fold, and that would be a gain of five bets. That would be exactly break-even. But if your bluff were to succeed more than that (more than one time in six), you would profit. You just shouldn’t make this bluff if one of your rivals were to be a calling station.
Another good example of a scare card would be an ace on the river. Chances would be, if your poker rival was holding a pocket pair, he wouldn’t like the ace, and he just could lay down his hand. Of course, if he were to happen to have an ace, you would get called. That would be why they call it gambling, though.
* Scare card: A scary-looking card for the situation. When two of one suit would be on the board, the emergence of a third card of that suit could be a scare card for anyone for whom that card would not make a flush. If you were to have two pair when there were to be three spades on the board, you could worry about someone having the needed two spades with which to you could make the flush. And if the third of a suit were a scare card, the fourth suited card would be even more so.
When to fold on the river if someone else has bet & you are last to act.
Say a rival to have bet and you were the last poker player standing between him and the pot. It would now be your job to verify the likelihood that you were holding the best hand. 
To do this, you would have to consider not only your hand, but also the way the hand has been played out.
If your poker opponent was to have bet the hand all the way through, and there were no real draws out there, it would be pretty likely that he could beat a middle pair. On the other hand, if you were the bettor, and now your rival was to bet on the river when a flush card was to emerge, you would need to consider how likely it would be that he would have drawn out on you.
In this position, you could put your hand’s chances into four categories:
- Best hand: you would be eighty-five percent certain you have the winner
- Toss-up hand: Your chance of winning would be about fifty-fifty
- Longshot hand: Your chance of holding the winner would be less than fifty percent
- Busted draw: Your chance of holding the winner would be almost none
You would always have to at least call when you would be holding what you would regard as either the best hand or a toss-up hand. Since your chances of winning would be fifty percent or better, you would be getting the correct price from the pot to make the call. The more certain you would be that you have opponent might have with which to call.
The water will get murkier when you would be holding a longshot hand. Here, you would need to know the size of the pot, so you could precisely assess the price you would be getting. For instance, if there was seventy-two dollars in the pot and it was costing you eight dollars to call, the pot would be laying you a price of nine-to-one.poker hand would need to win only one time in ten for calling to be correct. So, not only would you have to know how much was in the center, you must also be able to make a good estimation of your chances of winning the pot. With practice, you could develop this talent.
The lesson of longshot poker hands would be that you could call rather frequently on the river if you were to feel you have a decent chance of winning the pot. You wouldn’t need to be correct every time, or even most of the time, for calling to be the proper play. At the same time, you should make sure you are practical.
You shouldn’t throw money away in situations in which your poker rival would ninety-five percent certain to have you beat. Practice and single-mindedness in the game will help you become expert at precisely concluding your chances of winning the pot.