Saturday, February 4th, 2012
Blog > Stealing Blinds in texas Holdem
If you were to review the poker tracker stats of some of today’s new and young poker hotshots, you might notice a leak in their games. It’s blind stealing. To put it lightly, stealing blinds is one of the most overlooked and underrated strategies in Texas hold’em. By adapting a sound strategy and know-how related to the technique can make all the difference in your quest to profitability.
Stealing blinds is probably the best opportunity based move you can make in hold’em. See, this isn’t a move or a technique you do simply because you hear about it or because someone has told you to steal the blinds. You do it because it is a profit making move that sometimes can be downright easy to do. All it takes is the ability to recognize a good situation and in some situations it might take some guts. After all, blind stealing many times is nothing more than a well timed bluff.
The large and the small blind in general are in two of the worst positions at the poker table. For starters they have to put money into the pot before they even see their hand! In other positions at least you have the luxury of deciding if you want to enter the pot or not. Second, the blinds are always first to act throughout the hand, so they have the natural disadvantage of telegraphing their strategy to the rest of the table while having no information from other players to go on. Combined, these two characteristics make the blinds ripe for the picking in some situations.
With a blind steal, you are looking to capitalize on a player in a weak or weakened state. You will make an aggressive move to end the hand early and take either one or both of the blinds.
Blind stealing often works best from the later positions. A prime opportunity to steal the blinds is when the table seems less than enthusiastic about playing and it has been folded around to you. With a little research and by keeping track of your opponents, you’ll know how often a move like this will work and against which players. Again, knowing your opposition here is really the key. If you have bet or raised on nothing simply hoping the blinds give way, what will you do if one of them plays back? Do you have the information to know what the chances of them playing back at you will be? These are all very important considerations.
One way to maximize the potential of a blind stealing attempt and to have a chance in the battle if your attempt fails is to do a kind of semi bluff. In this situation you will be or raise with a questionable but ultimately playable hand and see what happens. If the blinds give way then great; you win the blinds with a hand you didn’t need to play. If you run into a call or a raise, at least you have a hand with some potential and you can take a look at the flop to see what happens. Don’t get attached to the hand though. If the flop doesn’t hit and you’re in trouble right off that bat, then by all means just give up the hand. You will have plenty of opportunities to steal the blinds in the future and there is no need to overplay a hand simply because you are insulted!
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