In home games, and even in some small stakes live games, blind stealing is sometimes frowned upon and inevitably some jerk at the table says, “Come on man let’s keep this game
friendly.” At no point in your poker life should you ever listen to this advice. Poker is a game of skill and you should consider it a war between you and the people you are
against. There is no friendly!
The term “Blind Stealing” itself describes the practice of being in late position and raising (when not raised to) strictly for the purpose of scooping up the blinds. You’ll
play a much wider range of hands with this philosophy, as much as double or even triple your normal starting range. It is highly situational dependant and a very profitable way to increase
your regular win rate. Its practice is seen in both cash game and tournament play, and is a skill used very aggressively at the highest limits. The flip side of this is when you find
yourself as a blind and recognizing people abusing you for your blinds – you have to be prepared for both scenarios in order to achieve success at the felt.
In the typical cash games, you’re big blind will be 1/100th of your starting stack, unless you’re one of those knee-biting short-stackers, in which case I hope you
immediately jump off a pier. Past that fact, the big blind is relatively very small at all times (blinds never increase in cash games) but adds up very quickly if you are multi-tabling over
the course of an hour session. In lower levels of online play in full ring, stealing blinds is about the easiest thing to do – many players play very tight and do not ever defend their
blinds light. When you get to mid-level 6max games, it’s a whole different ballgame.
The things you want to keep in mind with blind stealing:
1. What do your Holdem Manager (or PokerTracker) stats tell you? Does this blind defend their blinds a lot, or fold to blind
steals more than 80%?
2. What is your position? Are you in the HJ (hijack), CO (cutoff), or Button (dealer)? The closer you are to the button, the
wider your range gets.
3. What action has happened before you? If everyone has folded, this is prime blind-stealing country. If you have a limper,
look at their history – is this someone that has always been limping in? If so – ignore them.
4. If one of these blinds calls you, can you outplay them with a marginal hand with position in this scenario?
In this example we see a bad hand, K3 offsuit, on the button. From our stats we know the big blinds AND the small blind are both folding to steal attempts at a shocking 100%. That means
they fold to *every* steal attempt. This is the one case where I would even raise with 72 offsuit – they will just fold to anything! We put in a 3x raise … and this is a
debatable area. Some poker instructors say it doesn’t matter whether its 4x or 3x here because if a blind is going to call or raise you they will do so regardless. So, the 3x raise
method helps you actually because it gives you better odds for calling their raise and still accomplishes the steal theory in practice. So our hero raised 3x the big blind and both tight
players fold. An easy +$0.75 and money in the bank for a bad hand normally folded.
Here’s a different example of blind stealing when you’re even on the small blind…
We can all agree that 64 offsuit is best chucked when in the small blind. It really has very little value outside of it being an unsuited one-gapper that might hit a miracle straight. In
this example we see that our hero knows the Big Blind is a very tight player and has been regularly folding all day long. On top of this the Big Blind hasn’t been defending his blind at
all, so instead of folding (or calling which is wrong on many levels) he throws in a 3x raise, and the big blind folds. Mission accomplished. These little wins definitely add up –
and also help you sustain your win rate because other people *will* try to steal your blinds.
If you are familiar with a HUD or have already read through the article, what we are going to do in this article is run a quiz for you by providing a hand up until a certain point and then
offer you the stats of the villain.
