Stealing Blinds

Everyone loves stealing blinds, and with good reason. In no-limit hold'em tournaments, stealing blinds and antes is one of the most surefire ways to keep your stack growing, especially in the middle to late stages. It's good tournament strategy to try to increase your stack size without having to show your hand, and most everyone who enters tournaments understands this idea and tries to steal his fair share somewhere along the way. The secret is that not all steal situations are created equal, and finding a good one is more complicated than it looks. Learning when and how to steal in the most profitable manner will go a long way toward making anyone a very tough no-limit hold'em tournament player.

Late position is an obvious candidate spot for steal-raises, and you can and should make your fair share of opening bets from the button or cutoff (one to the right of the button) with medium-strength or even weak holdings. Sometimes, however, you're even more likely to get everyone to fold if you make your raise from early or middle position. I'm not saying you should go out and start raising with 7-2 offsuit from under the gun; with so many players behind you, you'll run into a truly big hand too enough for this play to work. But if you notice that late-position raises aren't getting the proper respect, you might want to try opening a little looser than normal from two, three, or even four seats to the right of the button. Finally, if you have an ultra-tight player in the big blind, you might want to loosen your range even more, no matter what position you're in.

Selecting the right seat from which to steal-raise is an important skill, but it's perhaps more important to know what to do if you happen to get reraised. First, note that you can't just automatically fold unless you have a big hand. Let's say, for example, that you're in steal mode and are opening for three times the big blind with any two Broadway cards, any pair, and any suited ace. Let's also say that if you get reraised, to a total of nine times the big blind, you choose to play on only with a pair of eights or better, A-Q, and A-K. If this is your plan, you're folding almost three-quarters of the time after you get reraised. In those instances, your opponent earns four-and-a-half big blinds - your three, one from the big blind, and half of one from the small blind - in profit. (For our purposes, we will ignore the small chance that someone behind the reraiser wakes up with a big hand and costs him his reraise.) Even if the reraiser loses literally every time you decide to call him, he is showing a profit, and would be justified in restealing from you with any two cards.

Clearly, your plan for defending your steal-raises has to be better than the plan I outlined in the above paragraph. In fact, you should be aiming to play on against a reraise at least half the time. So, what does that mean in practice? Well, for starters, it means that you have to find some hands other than A-Q, A-K, and biggish pairs with which to defend raises. (Alternatively, you also could just open-raise with much fewer hands, but this column began with the idea that steal-raising is crucial to tournament success, and that's an idea I'm firmly behind.) Which hands you pick is somewhat a matter of style, but here are a few guidelines: (1) With hands that want to see all five boardcards, like big aces or other big-card hands, you should consider putting in the third raise if it's (a) all in, (b) big enough to scare your opponent, and (c) small enough that it's not a ridiculous overbet. (2) If you're deep enough, you can consider calling with hands that have good implied odds, like suited connectors or suited aces, because you'll be able to extract value against your opponent's strong hands when you flop to your hand. You don't want to get carried away with this idea, but you don't want to forget about it, either. (3) Some hands that are not commonly considered big hands actually become big hands in certain situations. For example, if you've opened from under the gun, you can easily throw away a hand like K-Q to a reraise, as it's probably one of the worst hands in your distribution. But if you've opened from the button, K-Q is suddenly near the top of your range, and you almost certainly shouldn't fold it to a reraise.

The beauty of defending your raises is that not only does it allow you to lose less money to the restealers, it also gives your initial raise a better chance of working in the first place. Once your opponents see that you're not too inclined to give up your steal-raises without a fight, they'll be much more wary of reraising you with junk. Stealing blinds is not just about when and where you raise, but about how you've been dealing with your opponents when one of them decides to play a pot with you. Everything you do at a poker table affects everything else that happens at a poker table. Tournaments are not won one hand at a time; they are won through the accumulation of information over many hours. You defend raises because such defense is a key part of a strong overall strategy. Even in tournaments, where you may be with your opponents for only a short time, images get established extremely fast. Most successful tournament players are very much in tune with how others at the table perceive them. When a successful tournament player tries a steal-raise, he usually has a very good reason, and he usually has a good plan in place for what to do if the steal fails.

I hope the advice in this column helps to make you a slightly better thief. Good luck trying out your new stealing techniques in your next no-limit hold'em tournament.

Matt Matros is the author of The Making of a Poker Player, which is available online at www.CardPlayer.com. His next major tournament will be the Aussie Millions.