Poker When To Raise Blinds

1. A blind steal is when we raise with the intentions of picking up the blinds. If you are using a poker tracking program a steal is most likely defined as: 'any tooltip text='An open-raise is when a player raises after it's been folded to him'open-raise/tooltip made from the CO, Button, or SB.'.
2. The blinds are a slightly different kettle of fish. Firstly, players in the blind have to put in a small 'fee' before seeing their cards i.e. There are putting in money blind into the pot, hence the name. Secondly, when playing from the blinds, you will mostly be reacting to other player's raises as opposed to make them yourself.

I hate opponents who regularly raise out of the blinds in limit cash games. I specify the type of game because the following does not apply to tournaments or pot/no limit cash games. Raising out of the blinds in a limit cash game is a very dangerous move and should only be done in very short-handed situations. I wish to discuss reasons behind my stance on this particular strategy.

It encourages your opponents to draw out on you

The first major problem with raising out of the blinds is that it gives your opponents more reason to chase you. Let's say you held KK in the big blind and four people have called before it's your turn to act. If you don't raise, there will be five bets in the pot. Therefore, when you bet on the flop, your opponents will be getting pot odds of 6-1 to call. If one of your opponent held a hand like A-9 against your pocket kings and the flop comes J-10-5, your opponent is around 7-1 underdog. As such, he will be taking the worst of it if he calls when you bet on the flop.

If you raise out of the blinds in the above situation, it is unlikely that any of your opponents will fold for another bet before the flop. As a result, your raise will increase the pot to ten bets instead of five. Now when you bet on the flop, your opponent with A-9 is getting pot odds of 11-1 to call you on the flop. All of a sudden, you have made the proposition attractive to him by raising out of the blinds. Therefore, the first major problem with raising out of the blinds is that you encourage your opponents to call you on the flop because the pot offers good odds.

With 3 players or less, and 7.5 big blinds – 15 big blinds average stacks. The blinds are typically 150/300 up to 300/600. During the late stage of a poker tournament, you may find yourself comfortably placed in the money, or on the cusp of it. In any event, you will need to increase your aggression and pressurize your opponents as much as.

Psychological aspect

The second major problem with raising into a multi-way pot out of the blinds is more psychological. Most people who have limped before the flop are usually wanting to see the flop as cheaply as possible. They usually feel relief when the action reaches the blinds and no one has raised. Accordingly, when you raise the blinds, you shatter their hopes of seeing the flop cheaply. As a result, some of your opponents may become vindictive and try to 'run you down' with any sort of flop. Do you really want to encourage four or five opponents to call you all the way to the river when you hold QQ or KK or even AA?

Further, if you don't raise out of the blinds, your players are likely to show your more respect for your bet on the flop. If you hold QQ and the flop comes J-8-7, you will come out betting from an early position in an unraised flop. This looks dangerous to many opponents. Hopefully, some of the opponents who could draw out of you will fold on the flop or on the turn. However, if you raise out of the blinds before the flop, they may not show you as much respect and chase you down.

Let me put this in a percentage context. If you held QQ and your four opponents hold A9, K10, 66 and J9, you have a 35% chance of winning the pot on a flop of J-7-8. If you force the A9 and the 66 to fold on the flop, you will have a 51% chance of winning the pot. In raise before the flop, you may put these players in a bad mood and they will try to run you down, meaning that you will be facing 'true odds' on your hand.

Position problems

The third and most obvious reason you don't want to raise out of the blind is because you are out of position on all subsequent betting rounds. Because of that, people can get tricky with by putting in fancy raises and drawing free cards on the turn.

Also consider this: you have KK and raise out of the big blind. The flop comes: Ac-7c-10d. You bet and one opponent calls you. Does your opponent have an ace or a flush draw? You have no idea! Irregardless of what he/she holds, it is very difficult for you to bet out of position on the turn. If the turn is a rag, you are likely to check. If your opponent has the flush draw or middle pair, you just gave him/her a free card. Further, you gave him/her an opportunity to semi-bluff you (bluff with an out). And if they semi-bluff on the turn, it is likely that they will continue bluffing and try to buy the pot. How comfortable will you feel if you have to call bets on the turn and river with KK when there is an ace on the board?

In the above situation, I will not raise out of the blinds. If that flop came, I would bet out. If someone calls me, I will check on the turn. If I play my hand this way, my opponent usually thinks I've got an ace with a weak kicker. Accordingly, he usually believes that I will call the turn and river if he bets, so this reduces the chance that he's bluffing if he bets on the turn. Therefore, it will cost me two small bets (on before the flop and one on the flop) to work out if my hand is a reasonable chance of winning. If you raise out of the blind before the flop, you have committed two small bets + one small bet on the flop = 3 small bets. And after spending three small bets, you still don't have any useful information about your opponents hand on forth street.

You give away your hand

In the light of the above, I believe that raising out of the blinds prematurely gives your hand away. As a result, you are out of position and everyone has a fair idea of the strength of your hand. Not a great position to be in at a poker table.

When you should raise out of the blinds

My advice is to raise out of the blinds when it is extremely short-handed. If you are heads up before the flop, raise out of the big blind with any sort of strong hand, including As-Js and A-Q. Once there are more than three players in the pot, I prefer to check/call out of the blinds and bet out on the flop.

The other time you should raise out of the blinds is when two players have called and a third player raises in late position. In this situation, I will reraise and try to push one or both of the two callers out of the pot. If they both call your reraise before the flop, checkraise the late-position raiser when they bet on the flop. Also, if there are more than two callers between you and the late position raiser, I prefer to call before the flop and then check-raise the late position raiser on the flop. This is a very effective way of thinning the field on the flop.

Deception

One of the greatest advantages of calling out of the blinds with a big hand is the deception value. No one knows what you have. They usually assume that you have blind rubbish. I recall one very large pot that I won with A-A. Five opponents called before flop and I did not raise the big blind. The flop came A-2-9. I bet the flop and two players called. The turn: 2. I bet, an opponent raised, I reraised, he reraises, I reraised and he called. When he called my bet on the river, he asked: 'What do you have with your 2?' He was astounded when I rolled over my cards and asked: 'why didn't you give it a kick (raise) before the flop?' He had a pair of twos on the flop and when he made trips on the turn, he was absolutely certain that I did not have aces full. Because of that, he gave me a lot of action. If I raised out of the blind before the flop and then reraise him on the turn, he would probably realize or suspect that I have A-A and put on the breaks.

Side Advantages

There are two side advantages of not raising out of the blinds with a big hand. Your more observant opponents will get the impression that you don't always raise before the flop with two big cards. Therefore, if you limp into a pot further down the track with one of these more observant opponents, they may well suspect that you limped with a big hand and give you free cards on the flop and/or turn. This is particularly useful when you jump in with a hand like small suited connectors. The second side advantage is that you can force a player with the best hand to fold. For example, if I limp into the pot with 10-9 from a middle position and the flop comes J-10-6, I may raise anyone who bets on the flop. Some players may again suspect that you limped with a big hand before the flop and fold hands like A-10. While these are great side benefits, they will not work if your opponents are not very observant or do not act on their reads.

Position is one of the most important concepts in poker and is something that a lot of new players get completely wrong.

To put it simply:

Position in poker refers to the order which players are allowed to act. A player who acts first is 'out of position' while a player who acts last is 'in position'. Playing in position gives a distinct advantage due to the extra information gained and the ability to more effectively control the size of the pot.

There are two scenarios to discuss regarding position: preflop and postflop.

During the preflop round of betting, you can either be playing from early, middle, late position or the blinds with further breakdowns depending on your exact seat (which we will get into in a moment).

While postflop, your actual seat doesn't matter and it becomes much simpler because you are either 'in position' if you act last, 'out of position' if you act first or somewhere in between if there are more than two players in the pot.

The important thing to remember is that these two aspects are related. When you play from an early position preflop, you are more likely to have to play out of position postflop. Whereas if you play a hand from late position you are fairly likely (or in some cases guaranteed) to be playing in position for the rest of the hand.

The fact that your starting seat determines whether you are more or less likely to be playing in position postflop is a very important factor that drives our opening strategy quite significantly.

Let's dig deeper into this and find out what the positions are on the table and why understanding position is so important to playing winning poker.

Table Of Contents

• What are the starting positions in poker?

What are the starting positions in poker?

Each seat at the table is given a unique name which allows poker players to easily identify what hands they should be playing (more on that later) and how they might expect their opponents to play.

These seats are grouped into one of four categories:

• Early position
• Middle position
• Late position
• The blinds

The naming of the positions differs slightly depending on how many players are seated at your table, but let's first take full-ring (9 handed) which is the most common casino format.

The image below shows the four categories we mentioned but also broken down further with the names of each seat.

In case you aren't familiar with the acronyms, here's what they stand for:

• UTG: Under the gun
• MP: Middle position
• HJ: Hijack
• CO: Cutoff
• BTN: Button
• SB: Small blind
• BB: Big blind

Early position

The first seat to act is referred to as under the gun and is located in early position. 'Under the gun' is a term that means to be 'under pressure to act' as in you are 'being held at gunpoint'.

This translates to the analogy of the first seat at the poker table who is under pressure to make the opening decision of the freshly dealt hand.

On a full ring table with nine players in total, there are eight players waiting to act after UTG. So there is a strong likelihood that if you decide to play your hand, another player at the table will wake up with a premium hand.

Even if someone is dealt a mediocre hand and decides to play, you will be playing out of position on postflop unless they happen to be in the blinds.

Because of this, you must carefully select what hands you wish to play.

To illustrate this a little further, let's imagine we would like to open 66 from UTG. To some, this may be a fairly standard open.

But consider the probability of that any one of these players has a strong or premium hand of 77+, AJs+, KQs, AQo+, KQo

This range represents 7.5% off all hands, and the probability of a player having one of these hands is shown below:

So there is almost 50% chance some has a hand that is at least flipping with 66 and in many cases dominating. Pocket 66s only has 37% chance of winning if you were to go all-in versus that range, however, you will realise a lot less of that equity due to the likelihood of high card to your pair making it very difficult to play.

Poker Raise Call

Equity realisation is a complicated subject which I won't go into detail here on but PokerNerve has a great article on the topic which you can read here.

So the key takeaway:

Moving clockwise around the table, the next player to act is referred to as 'under the gun plus one' or UTG+1. This seat plays very similarly to the UTG and hence these two positions are grouped into early position poker strategy.

Since there are only seven players left to act when opening from UTG+1, you can play slightly more hands. A typical opening range on a full ring table will be approximately 9% from UTG and 10% from UTG +1 which looks something like this:

These images are from a piece of software called Equilab which you can download for free here. This software allows you to save your ranges for later, turn percentage opens into actual hand ranges and calculate your equity versus another hand or range.

Middle position

The next position category is middle position. From here you should still be playing fairly conservatively, however, you can open a few more combos of hands when compared to UTG since two players have already folded meaning it is less likely:

• That you will come up against a strong hand
• That you will be forced to play out of position postflop

MP+1 should also be played in a similar manner to MP, albeit with slightly looser starting hand requirements.

A typical opening range will be approximately 12% from MP and 16% for MP +1 as shown below:

What You Raise In Poker

Late position

Following MP is late position which represents the three seats of hijack, cutoff and button.

We use individual names for each of these positions since they play quite differently and as a result, there is quite a large difference in strategy needed.

Although this might seem like a lot to take in at the moment, with all the different seat names and acronyms, you will have no problem remembering once you get in some practice. It completely automatic to me now and I don't even have to think about it.

Hijack will play more hands than MP with a 19% opening range but it's not until the cutoff and the button where we really start to open our range up. For example, in the cutoff we will like to open 26% or so of hands whereas on the button (OTB), we will open closer to 45% of hands if you are facing suitable players in the blinds.

Here is what the button opening rang might look like:

The reason for the stark adjustment in starting hands is because there are so few players left to act (either 3 for the cutoff, or 2 for the button) and if we do get action, we will be in position against the blinds.

Due to the fact that you will always act last on the button when playing postflop, it is considered the best and is almost always the most profitable seat on a poker table.

The blinds

The blinds are a slightly different kettle of fish. Firstly, players in the blind have to put in a small 'fee' before seeing their cards i.e. there are putting in money blind into the pot, hence the name.

Secondly, when playing from the blinds, you will mostly be reacting to other player's raises as opposed to make them yourself. This forces you to use a different strategy than we have been using up until now – you must now start calling much more often, particularly from the big blind.

The Small Blind is the worst seat (as you will always act out of position and act with the least amount of information) and the Big Blind is the least profitable seat on the table as you have to put a whole big blind into the pot without even seeing your cards.

The two redeeming qualities of the big blind are that we already have 1 bb invested into the pot which means despite our positional disadvantage versus all seats except the SB, we will usually have the opportunity to 'close the action' by calling and seeing the flop.

Closing the action means that we are guaranteed to realise some of our equity (potentially allowing us to hit a piece of the flop). The same can't be said for the SB where if we call a raise, the Big Blind has the opportunity to reraise us with a squeeze and put us in a tough spot.

6-max tables generally play much more aggressively and in many ways can be thought of by just simply removing the first three seats from a full ring table.

However, the naming convention also changes somewhat i.e. the first player to act in a 6max table is still called under the gun (and not MP+1 as would be the case in a full ring table).

Poker When To Raise Blinds Without

The naming convention for a 6max table is shown below.

For the difference between a fullring and 6max table strategy, see my article here on this topic.

The other time you should raise out of the blinds is when two players have called and a third player raises in late position. In this situation, I will reraise and try to push one or both of the two callers out of the pot. If they both call your reraise before the flop, checkraise the late-position raiser when they bet on the flop. Also, if there are more than two callers between you and the late position raiser, I prefer to call before the flop and then check-raise the late position raiser on the flop. This is a very effective way of thinning the field on the flop.

Deception

One of the greatest advantages of calling out of the blinds with a big hand is the deception value. No one knows what you have. They usually assume that you have blind rubbish. I recall one very large pot that I won with A-A. Five opponents called before flop and I did not raise the big blind. The flop came A-2-9. I bet the flop and two players called. The turn: 2. I bet, an opponent raised, I reraised, he reraises, I reraised and he called. When he called my bet on the river, he asked: 'What do you have with your 2?' He was astounded when I rolled over my cards and asked: 'why didn't you give it a kick (raise) before the flop?' He had a pair of twos on the flop and when he made trips on the turn, he was absolutely certain that I did not have aces full. Because of that, he gave me a lot of action. If I raised out of the blind before the flop and then reraise him on the turn, he would probably realize or suspect that I have A-A and put on the breaks.

Side Advantages

There are two side advantages of not raising out of the blinds with a big hand. Your more observant opponents will get the impression that you don't always raise before the flop with two big cards. Therefore, if you limp into a pot further down the track with one of these more observant opponents, they may well suspect that you limped with a big hand and give you free cards on the flop and/or turn. This is particularly useful when you jump in with a hand like small suited connectors. The second side advantage is that you can force a player with the best hand to fold. For example, if I limp into the pot with 10-9 from a middle position and the flop comes J-10-6, I may raise anyone who bets on the flop. Some players may again suspect that you limped with a big hand before the flop and fold hands like A-10. While these are great side benefits, they will not work if your opponents are not very observant or do not act on their reads.

Position is one of the most important concepts in poker and is something that a lot of new players get completely wrong.

To put it simply:

Position in poker refers to the order which players are allowed to act. A player who acts first is 'out of position' while a player who acts last is 'in position'. Playing in position gives a distinct advantage due to the extra information gained and the ability to more effectively control the size of the pot.

There are two scenarios to discuss regarding position: preflop and postflop.

During the preflop round of betting, you can either be playing from early, middle, late position or the blinds with further breakdowns depending on your exact seat (which we will get into in a moment).

While postflop, your actual seat doesn't matter and it becomes much simpler because you are either 'in position' if you act last, 'out of position' if you act first or somewhere in between if there are more than two players in the pot.

The important thing to remember is that these two aspects are related. When you play from an early position preflop, you are more likely to have to play out of position postflop. Whereas if you play a hand from late position you are fairly likely (or in some cases guaranteed) to be playing in position for the rest of the hand.

The fact that your starting seat determines whether you are more or less likely to be playing in position postflop is a very important factor that drives our opening strategy quite significantly.

Let's dig deeper into this and find out what the positions are on the table and why understanding position is so important to playing winning poker.

Table Of Contents

• What are the starting positions in poker?

What are the starting positions in poker?

Each seat at the table is given a unique name which allows poker players to easily identify what hands they should be playing (more on that later) and how they might expect their opponents to play.

These seats are grouped into one of four categories:

• Early position
• Middle position
• Late position
• The blinds

The naming of the positions differs slightly depending on how many players are seated at your table, but let's first take full-ring (9 handed) which is the most common casino format.

The image below shows the four categories we mentioned but also broken down further with the names of each seat.

In case you aren't familiar with the acronyms, here's what they stand for:

• UTG: Under the gun
• MP: Middle position
• HJ: Hijack
• CO: Cutoff
• BTN: Button
• SB: Small blind
• BB: Big blind

Early position

The first seat to act is referred to as under the gun and is located in early position. 'Under the gun' is a term that means to be 'under pressure to act' as in you are 'being held at gunpoint'.

This translates to the analogy of the first seat at the poker table who is under pressure to make the opening decision of the freshly dealt hand.

On a full ring table with nine players in total, there are eight players waiting to act after UTG. So there is a strong likelihood that if you decide to play your hand, another player at the table will wake up with a premium hand.

Even if someone is dealt a mediocre hand and decides to play, you will be playing out of position on postflop unless they happen to be in the blinds.

Because of this, you must carefully select what hands you wish to play.

To illustrate this a little further, let's imagine we would like to open 66 from UTG. To some, this may be a fairly standard open.

But consider the probability of that any one of these players has a strong or premium hand of 77+, AJs+, KQs, AQo+, KQo

This range represents 7.5% off all hands, and the probability of a player having one of these hands is shown below:

So there is almost 50% chance some has a hand that is at least flipping with 66 and in many cases dominating. Pocket 66s only has 37% chance of winning if you were to go all-in versus that range, however, you will realise a lot less of that equity due to the likelihood of high card to your pair making it very difficult to play.

Poker Raise Call

Equity realisation is a complicated subject which I won't go into detail here on but PokerNerve has a great article on the topic which you can read here.

So the key takeaway:

Moving clockwise around the table, the next player to act is referred to as 'under the gun plus one' or UTG+1. This seat plays very similarly to the UTG and hence these two positions are grouped into early position poker strategy.

Since there are only seven players left to act when opening from UTG+1, you can play slightly more hands. A typical opening range on a full ring table will be approximately 9% from UTG and 10% from UTG +1 which looks something like this:

These images are from a piece of software called Equilab which you can download for free here. This software allows you to save your ranges for later, turn percentage opens into actual hand ranges and calculate your equity versus another hand or range.

Middle position

The next position category is middle position. From here you should still be playing fairly conservatively, however, you can open a few more combos of hands when compared to UTG since two players have already folded meaning it is less likely:

• That you will come up against a strong hand
• That you will be forced to play out of position postflop

MP+1 should also be played in a similar manner to MP, albeit with slightly looser starting hand requirements.

A typical opening range will be approximately 12% from MP and 16% for MP +1 as shown below:

What You Raise In Poker

Late position

Following MP is late position which represents the three seats of hijack, cutoff and button.

We use individual names for each of these positions since they play quite differently and as a result, there is quite a large difference in strategy needed.

Although this might seem like a lot to take in at the moment, with all the different seat names and acronyms, you will have no problem remembering once you get in some practice. It completely automatic to me now and I don't even have to think about it.

Hijack will play more hands than MP with a 19% opening range but it's not until the cutoff and the button where we really start to open our range up. For example, in the cutoff we will like to open 26% or so of hands whereas on the button (OTB), we will open closer to 45% of hands if you are facing suitable players in the blinds.

Here is what the button opening rang might look like:

The reason for the stark adjustment in starting hands is because there are so few players left to act (either 3 for the cutoff, or 2 for the button) and if we do get action, we will be in position against the blinds.

Due to the fact that you will always act last on the button when playing postflop, it is considered the best and is almost always the most profitable seat on a poker table.

The blinds

The blinds are a slightly different kettle of fish. Firstly, players in the blind have to put in a small 'fee' before seeing their cards i.e. there are putting in money blind into the pot, hence the name.

Secondly, when playing from the blinds, you will mostly be reacting to other player's raises as opposed to make them yourself. This forces you to use a different strategy than we have been using up until now – you must now start calling much more often, particularly from the big blind.

The Small Blind is the worst seat (as you will always act out of position and act with the least amount of information) and the Big Blind is the least profitable seat on the table as you have to put a whole big blind into the pot without even seeing your cards.

The two redeeming qualities of the big blind are that we already have 1 bb invested into the pot which means despite our positional disadvantage versus all seats except the SB, we will usually have the opportunity to 'close the action' by calling and seeing the flop.

Closing the action means that we are guaranteed to realise some of our equity (potentially allowing us to hit a piece of the flop). The same can't be said for the SB where if we call a raise, the Big Blind has the opportunity to reraise us with a squeeze and put us in a tough spot.

6-max tables generally play much more aggressively and in many ways can be thought of by just simply removing the first three seats from a full ring table.

However, the naming convention also changes somewhat i.e. the first player to act in a 6max table is still called under the gun (and not MP+1 as would be the case in a full ring table).

Poker When To Raise Blinds Without

The naming convention for a 6max table is shown below.

For the difference between a fullring and 6max table strategy, see my article here on this topic.

Note that in a 10 handed table there is also an UTG+2 added before MP starts. In this case, UTG should play slightly tighter and on a 9-handed table.

Poker Position Hand Chart:

Here is an example of how we would play pairs in a 6max game:

As shown, we should almost always play pairs since they are one of the best starting hand types. But with the other hand types, it is less cut and dry.

Small Blind Poker

To receive your full free 6max & full ring starting hand chart, Click here for 6max and here for fullring.

Check out the Common Poker Mistakesto keep learning.

Poker Big Blinds

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