First up – so what are blinds all about then?

Blinds in Hold’em serve a purpose similar to antes in Stud games: they create an incentive for a player to invest and/or attack. Without and ‘starter money’, there would be little incentive for an intelligent player to make the first bet, even with a very good hand. If everyone else fold, he’s won nothing. Without blinds or antes, the first bet is merely a target, and the other players could safely fold without an unbeatable hand.

By forcing the player to the dealer’s left to post a small blind (SB) and the player to his left to pay a big blind (BB – usually double that of the small blind), hold’em becomes much more interesting and action filled. Each hand begins as a battle for the blinds, and once that battle begins, the pot starts to grow, and the reasons to play grow with it.

Low stakes games rarely end with the first raise; in high stakes games, especially no limit tournament final tables, the first raise often does end the hand.

Even though blinds serve a purpose similar to antes, they function quite differently. Antes are “dead money”. Anteing merely entitles you to receive cards; you still must make a bet to engage in the action. If you post one of the blinds, though, your money counts as a bet (it’s “live”). If you post the BB, and no one else plays, you win the hand. You won’t have won much – only the SB (usually half the size fo the BB although it can vary from 1/3 to 2/3 of it’s size).

While any win helps, the more often the fact that your blind money counts as a bet will make getting involved in many other hands easier, because you’re getting to play for a discount price.

Correct Blind Play: Making the best of a bad situation

When, why, and how you should play when you’re getting that discount is a widely misunderstood subject. Let’s start with a key principle behind correct blind play. Some situations are natural money losers, and the hands when you post the blinds fall into that category. If you had to poast the BB every hand, you’d get slaughtered: you’re in early position (bad), and investing your money before you see your cards (also bad). Over the long haul, you will lose money on your blind hands – not every time, of course, but on balance. The key is to lose as little as possible, so you can make money overall by taking advantage of your premium situations, like when you site in late position.

Let’s start with an elementary blind play decision. You’ve posted the $30 BB in a no-limit hold’em game; your neighbor to the right has posted the $15 SB. Everyone folds around the button, who decides to raise it to a total of $90 (a $60 raise). The small blind folds, and now it’s up to you. Does this hand continue or does the button win $45?

Understanding the risks

Assuming you have a plausible hand (more on that in a moment), you have to assess your risk/reward ratio, and to do that, you have to decide whether you’re going to try to win the pot by calling and then winning on the flop, or by raising and trying to win right away.

Raising will cost you $60 plus the amount you raise, let’s say you raise an additional $180, a total bet of $240. The tricky part is to understand what you’re trying to win with your raise: you’re trying to claim only $135. Some people mistakenly think “After I call, my raise is giving me a shot at a $195 pot (in other words, thinking that their $180 raise might buy them $195).

They’re wrong: the pot only becomes $195 after your call. Your $240 bet is a shot at the money already in the pot – and that was only $135 when you made your move.

There’s a big difference between risking $180 to win $195 and risking $240 to win $135. The first play (were the numbers accurate) doesn’t even have to succeed half the time to be profitable. The second has to work 64% of the time just to break even (actually a bit more than that when you remember you’re paying rake).

The math changes when you try to win by calling and then making a decision on the flop. Your $60 call cannot win the pot. All calling does is give you the right to make a play later in the hand, and that will necessarily mean risking more money then. If the flop is favorable enough, it may not be much of a risk: if the flop is unfavorable, your money may be gone and your only remaining chance will be an opportunity to lose more.

You $60 call creates a $195 pot. If you assume that you will only make a move at the pot when the flop is favorable (good player’s actions of course are more complex than that!) you can call, in a purely mathematical sense, if the flop will be favorable 30.8% of the time (60 divided by 195). Whether hitting the flop is easier or more difficult than that depends to some extent on your hand, and to some extent on how easy or hard it is to outplay your opponents on the flop.

How well you think you can get “paid off” when you hit you hand also makes a huge difference, and remember, it’s much harder to get paid off handsomely when you’re acting out of position – and that’s exactly what you’re doing when playing from the blind.
I’ll continue in my next blog posting to cover how to defend those blinds and also include 5 golden rules for playing from the blinds. Check it out tomorrow!

Kishan Neilsen

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