A perfect example of this is in the middle stages of a tournament, when blinds are getting high, but antes haven’t kicked in. A tight, solid player limps from 1st position for $150. Everyone folds to you in the small blind, and you look down at 8c2h. You have a $1275 stack, $75 invested, and $375 in the pot, and it costs you $75 to call. In this situation, a fold should be automatic. Look at your pot odds; you’re paying $75 to attempt to win a pot of $450, giving you 5:1 direct odds to win the pot. The problems in this calculation, however, are less obvious. One thing to consider is the big blind, who has yet to act on his hand. If he raises, even if he just doubles the blind, are you willing to invest another $150 to see the flop? If you answered no, congrats, at least you’re getting out with some chips intact.

But, if you say, “Wait, I put $150 chips in the pot already, how can I fold for $150 more? It’s that pot odds thing, right?” Your pot odds to call $150 more actually remain the same; (5:1 @ $150 to win $900) two problems arise from making this call, though. The first one stems from your implied odds, “If I hit my hand, how much can I expect to profit, knowing sometimes I may lose when I hit?” By investing more money in as an obvious underdog in the hand, you naturally detract from the amount of money you can extract later in the hand. And with something as weak as 82o, you’re going to have to flop something powerful; two pair or trips; to feel like you have an extracting type of hand. Those flops come very infrequently, though, something in the neighborhood of 30:1. Your pot odds (5:1) and your implied odds (with $975 chips left, you could only extract $1,950 chips from the remaining two players, giving you just 2:1 against the size of the pot) are your guideline for making this an easy fold.

The second, and more important reason, is the utilization of those chips in more profitable situations. Instead of limping in the small blind for $75 with 82o, leaving yourself $1,200, why not just muck, keep your $75, and look for a better opportunity to wield your chips against the blinds? The extra $75, seemingly insignificant, can be the difference between your stack being able to steal blinds and the big blind being pot committed to call your shove. Especially in later levels, where stack sizes are tiny compared to the blinds, half a big blind can make all the difference in how a hand plays out.

With this in mind, it’s good to have a guideline of sorts for limping/raising standards when playing out of the blinds. Notice that the guideline changes as the tournament progresses; middle-late and late stage tournament play will be discussed in a later article.

Based on PokerStars Blind Structures ($1,500 starting chips, assuming your stack is roughly average)

Early Stages ($10/$20-$75/$150)

Unraised Pots

Raise- QQ+, AKs (NOTE: Be sure the raise here is stout; add roughly one big blind to your normal raise for every limper in the pot, so if, for example, 4 players limp in the $10/$20 level and you’re dealt AKs, instead of making it $60, you’d make it $120.This way, you’re negating your positional disadvantage by charging players incorrectly to see the flop.)

Call- 22+, Ax+, Kx+, Q5+, J7+, 107+, any connected suited or one gap connected suited cards (NOTE: This is as loose as you’ll see requirements here, as the stages increase, the bottom level of calling hands drop out and the upper tier of calling hands start to raise.)

Raised Pots

Reraise- QQ+, AKs (NOTE: With all of these hands except AA, my reraise is also going to be on the big side, somewhere between 3.5x-4.5x the original raise. So, if a middle position player makes it $100, my reraise is going to be between $350-$450 instead of the typical $300. I prefer to end the hand now rather than take a flop, especially with QQ.)

Call-66+, A10s+, AJo+, KQs (NOTE: This area can be a bit tricky; if there are two or more callers, I stretch out to all pocket pairs and most suited aces, but if it’s been folded to you, I drop sixes, sevens, A10s, KQs and AJo out of my range.)

Early-Middle Stages ($100/$200-$300/$600 [$50])

Unraised Pots

Raise- 77+, A10s+, AJo+, KQs (NOTE: We added a few hands here to take advantage of the antes that have now kicked in, along with the additional knowledge that no one in this pot has shown a great interest in it. Be wary of early position limpers, but, for the most part, go ahead and attack the blinds and antes with this range.)

Call- 22-66, Axs, K10s+, KJo, KQo, QJs, Q10s, J10s (NOTE: Your hand range to call with has dropped dramatically, here, but the escalating blinds force your hand, here. Also, if the table has folded to your small blind or you’re in the big blind and only the small blind has called, all the hands in this list become fine raising hands. You only have one player to beat, so aggression is key. If there is more than one caller, however, it’s best to just stick to the guideline.)

Raised Pots

Raise-JJ+,AQs, AKo/AKs (NOTE: We can add a few new hands to our reraising range here, as the escalating blinds will make stealing more prevalent. The size of the reraise here becomes more important, though. Against a single raiser, if their stack remaining behind them is fairly short, M=8 or less, I prefer to shove rather than make a 3x reraise with JJ/AQo. Example; a player with $4,600 opens for $600 on the button, and you have AQo in the $200 BB. If you make it $1,800, he can flat for $1,200 and leave you in an awkward position on flops with overs (JJ) or medium cards (AQ) given your position in the hand. In order to negate that positional disadvantage, a shove here works wonders. With the stronger hands, the 2.5x-3x reraise can be more effective at extracting chips.)

Call-77+, A10s+, AJo+, KQ (NOTE: The blinds aren’t high enough here to justify getting reckless with these hands, if you have a good sized stack of M>8 or so. If you suspect a button raiser of being a bit light, any of these hands can justify a reraise, but against EP and MP players, a flat call seems more prudent.)

Middle Stages-Late Stages ($400/$800-Final Table)

Unraised Pots

Raise- 77+, A9s+, A10o+, KQs/o, KJs (NOTE: We widen our range as the other players in the tournament widen their ranges to attack the blinds, which now account for crucial chunks of their stack. Given that information, we can widen our reraise range to take full advantage; a lot of advanced tournament players have much wider ranges for raising than ours. We’re keeping ours at a slightly more conservative range in order to make things simpler on our end. We have some weaker hands in there, like KJs and 77, to throw off people who expect us to be playing tight somewhat. But, in general, we’re continuing with a solid, tight aggressive game with this range, which should be wide enough to pick off bluffers and get paid off when they have a hand they can put their stack in with.)

Call- In this stage of the tournament, given our relative skill level, I think choosing to never flat call, as a beginning player, is actually an acceptable strategy. By only reraising or folding, you take flop play out of the equation from your blind play, meaning position is rarely a factor in your decision making processes. As you become a more advanced player, you can start to do a few more advanced maneuvers, like the stop and go, or taking a flop to float a hyper-aggressive player in order to take it from him on the turn. Until you’re comfortable with that, however, advocating a strict raise/fold policy from the blinds later in a tournament is perfectly acceptable.

Raised Pots

Raise- 1010+, AJs+, AQo+ (Again, some fluctuation here is needed to elaborate our ranges a bit better. If the raiser is early position and has at least a medium stack, I think 1010 and AJs are OK to just muck. If the raiser is late position, I’m fully capable of 3-betting with 55 or A8s if I feel like the raiser is weak and I can take the pot most of the time.)

Call- I’m still inclined to go with the raise/fold philosophy of playing the blinds here, especially if you’re a rookie, with one glaring exception. AA/KK can work as a flat calling hand if your opponent is hyper-aggro. Your opponent opens on the Co to 2.5x, and you’re in the BB with AA. The best way to extract chips from a hyper-aggro player is to flat, then check/raise-shove any flop. A 3-bet, especially from you, given the tight guidelines this primer has laid out, will induce a fold from all but the top tier hands if the opponent is observant. The flat-check play, though, can cause your opponent to c-bet most flops with air against you.

Blind play in NLH tournaments can be one of the most tricky aspects of your game to develop. By starting with these rigid, tight guidelines, and learning how to adapt them to your game and expand from them, you’ll find it easier than most players to elevate your game in blind play to another level. We’ll talk about the float and the stop and go in a later article, but for now, start utilizing the ranges listed in your game and get more profitable immediately.

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Answering these questions is a reflex for successful tournament players, but newer players and intermediate players often fail to realize that evaluating the table dynamic thoroughly is essentially the only way (save getting pretty lucky) that you can transform a shorter stack into a stack that can compete for the win. To put it more succinctly: if you don’t pick up some pots uncontested with a 10-25BB stack as the bubble approaches, you’re going to need a ton of luck to make the money, let alone make the final table.

In this two-part article, we’ll break down the factors that will allow you to hopefully generate the best answer to each question. We’re not going to discuss hand strength in detail – this isn’t an article that will tell you to push X hand in Y spot. Instead, we’re going to try and define the most optimal spots for blind stealing and light three betting regardless of cards. Part one focuses on the question of stealing blinds, and part two will tackle the question of three betting.

This article assumes you’re at a stage of the tournament where antes have kicked in. If they haven’t, or if you’re playing a tournament without antes, you should just adjust all of your assumptions in a more conservative direction to compensate for the decreased reward (i.e., the smaller starting pot size).

WHAT’S MY BEST SPOT FOR STEALING THE BLINDS?
When you have a stack of 8BBs – 13BBs, your number one concern has to be identifying optimal spots for stealing the blinds. What distinguishes a good spot from a bad spot? There are a few key factors to consider.

Number of players to act behind
This one’s pretty simple on the surface: The more players to act behind you, the greater the chance that someone will wake up with a hand willing to call you. Let’s say you somehow know for certain that everyone at the table will only call with 99+ and AQ+. That’s roughly 5% of all possible hands. If you raise first to act at a nine handed table, that leaves 8 players still to act, meaning you’ll get called about 40% of the time (the actual number is a bit lower, but this is close enough for our discussion). If you raise from the button with only two players to act, you’re only getting called 10% of the time. That gap is huge, and seems to suggest that the later you raise, the better your chance for success.

Unfortunately, real poker tables don’t behave quite as neatly as our hypothetical one. For one thing, the earlier a raise is, the more respect it commands (generally speaking), and the more pressure it places on players on your immediate left, as they have to worry about all of the players still to act. Raises from the button and the cutoff have become so standard that players are calling those raises with a much wider range than top 5%.

There’s also the critical issue of opportunity. While later position raises may seem more favorable, the later you are the more likely it is that someone will open the pot in front of you. If you’re looking to steal the blinds, you (with very few exceptions) want to be the first player in the pot.

So, to summarize: early position brings with it the advantages of being able to represent strength and a greater opportunity to open the pot, but the disadvantage of a significantly larger chance of being called by a strong hand. Later position raises have the advantage of a smaller chance of being called by a strong hand, but the disadvantages of fewer opportunities to open the pot and less ability to represent strength.

Opponent tendencies
This is a fairly straightforward factor. Against tighter opponents, your steal has a greater chance of success; against looser opponents, your steal has a lower chance of success.

Of particular interest to you are the tendencies of your opponents in the blinds. These are the spots that are generally going to give the most thought to calling you with the broadest range, not only because they already have money invested, but because they either get to close the action in the BB or have only one more player to worry about behind in the SB. Their tendencies should, generally speaking, trump your considerations of the tendencies of the other players still to act – so, if you’re two seats off the button and are considering stealing, you’d rather have loose players on the cutoff and button and tight players in the blinds than tight players in the cutoff and button and loose players in the blinds.

Another thing to consider about your opponents is their recent activity. While tendencies certainly vary by player, I’ve found that opponents with smaller to average stacks who just won a pot are less likely to get involved without a hand, while larger stacked opponents who just lost a hand are more likely to get involved. Again, these are broad generalizations that vary wildly by buy in level, so make a point of paying attention to how players at your level seem to react immediately after winning or losing a pot.

So, to summarize: Tighter opponents make for more successful steals, especially if your opponents in the blinds are tight.

Stack sizes
It’s my opinion that the best stack size to steal against when you’re a short stack is a stack in the 25-30BB range. When you have a larger stack, these types of stacks are less attractive targets because of their ability to three bet you, but when you’re short, you’re usually putting most or all of your stack in preflop, so the threat of a three bet is moot.

Why 25-30BBs? These stacks exist at a nice intersection for your steal attempt. They’re small enough that they can’t call your raises lightly, as they’re be committing a third to half of their stack, and they’re large enough that your opponents won’t be feeling much pressure to get involved in a hand. That’s two strong factors that (generally) are going to limit your opponent’s calling range to very strong hands. Smaller stacks will be more in tune with your small stack mindset, making them more likely to assign you a wide range, and will be feeling the pressure of the blinds and antes, making them more likely to commit with a wider range. As stacks move north of 30BBs, players become more willing to gamble, especially if they’re in the BB. Take a typical scenario in the late stages of a tournament where the blinds are 500 / 1000 with 100 antes. Let’s say you have 9k in the CO and the BB has 36k. The table folds to you and you raise. The button and SB fold.

How does this look from the BB’s perspective? They’re looking at calling 8k more to win your 9k plus the 2500 or so already in the pot, so they’re getting almost 1.5-1, and if they call and lose, they’ll still have a healthy stack. That’s a recipe for a wide calling range.

Again, the critical players to pay attention to are the blinds. The stacks in between you and blinds are certainly relevant, but the players most likely to call your raise light are almost always the blinds. The exception to that rule is when you have an exceedingly large or short stack in between you and the blinds.

In a nutshell: Look for medium-sized stacks to steal against, and if you can’t find those, prefer shorter stacks to larger stacks.

Miscellaneous Factors
In addition to the above, you should also consider your image (tighter is better for raising light), what stage the tournament is at (your raises will probably get more respect from short and medium stacks if you’re near the bubble but far less respect from bigger stacks), the buy in level (the higher the buy in, the more likely that players in the blinds will call you properly, which is to say with a wider range) and, of course, your cards (even though you’re stealing, it’s still nice to have some backup).

Summary
When you find yourself in a tournament with a dwindling stack, you need to turn your attention immediately to identifying your best opportunities to steal the blinds. While there’s no absolute formula for picking an optimal spot, a thorough consideration of the above factors will help you move beyond the blunt strategy of simply hoping the table folds to you in late position.

In the next part of the article, we’ll look at how these factors (along with some others) can be used to help you identify the best spots for three betting light preflop.

In this article, we’re going to focus on a fairly common BVB spot: playing a marginal hand from the small blind when the table has folded to you. There are four critical variables that impact your decision making in this particular spot: your image, opponent’s image, your stack size and opponent’s stack size. Instead of discussing every possible permutation of those four variables, we’ll take one hand and dissect it, noting in the discussion how your play might change if one of the variables was different.

The Hand

This hand is taken from a $50 one rebuy one addon tournament on Full Tilt Poker. 15 players remain, and you’ve been pretty aggressive. The BB has been pretty tight. You have K4 offsuit and the table folds to you.

Your Options

You have five reasonable options here, more or less. You can fold, you can call, you can raise small and fold, you can raise small and call, or you can push all in. We’ll discuss the EV of your choices in terms of BBs (Big Blinds) to keep things simple. After posting the blinds, you have about 35 BBs and your opponent has about 11 BBs, with about 2.5 BBs in the pot.

Folding is totally reasonable. You have a good stack, you have an aggressive image, and taking a hand off might give your next raises a bit more credibility. However, I think there’s enough money in the middle that you really need to keep the foot on the gas at least some of the time, so let’s admit that folding some of the time is an acceptable play and move on to exploring the active options in more depth.

Let’s start with calling. If you just limp, we’ll assume your tight opponent is raising you only with solid hands, so let’s say 15% of the time. That’s a range that includes all strong aces, most pairs and the stronger broadway combos. When he raises, you have to fold, so 15% of the time you lose 1500 chips. Now let’s discuss the other 85% of the time. What’s your plan if you limp and he checks? A handy line against a tight player out of position is simply to lead every single flop for about 2/3rd pot or thereabouts. Let’s say you lead every single flop for 6000 into 8800. Your opponent will miss the flop and fold to your bet about 65% of the time. The other 35% he’ll hit and you’ll shut down entirely. So, 35% of the time you’ll lose 7500 (the call plus the lead), and 65% of the time you’ll win 8800. That lets us determine the overall EV of calling and leading every flop:

EV = (15% of the time you limp-fold and lose 1500 chips) + (85% * ((35% you lead 6000 (plus your 1500 for the preflop call) and give up when called) + (65% you lead 6000 and win 8800))

Or

EV = (.15 * -1500) + ( .85 * ((.35 * -7500) + (.65 * 8800)) )

EV = -225 + 2779 = 2559

So, the expected value of calling and leading under these conditions is about 2500 chips, or just under 1 BB. Not terrible, given that you only risk 2.5 BBs and well under 10% of your stack.

Let’s go to the other end of the spectrum and discuss raising all in. I think we can assume this tight player has a narrower calling range than re-raising range. Let’s say he’s calling the shove with the top 10% or so of hands – most pairs and AJ+. So, 90% of the time, he folds and you win the 7300 in the middle. The other 10% of the time, your K4 puts up a decent fight, winning 30% and losing 70%. So, the EV looks like:

EV = (.90 * 7300) + (.10 * ( (.30 * 41300) + (.70 * -35500) )

EV = 6570 + -1246 = 5324

… or just a bit under 2BBs. Note, however, that you’re putting much more of your stack at risk to chase this edge – over 35k, which is more than a third of your stack. Also worth noting is the difference in the risk reward ratio between shoving and limp-leading. Shoving risks about 12 BBs to gain 2 BBs, while limp-leading is about 2.5 BBs to 1 BB. The more skewed the risk-reward ratio of a play is, the more variance that play will introduce into your results. That’s not to say a high-risk reward ration automatically makes one play worse than another with a lower ratio, but it’s certainly a factor to consider when weighing your options.

How about the raise-call? This wouldn’t be terrible against a BB who was aggressive and pushing back wide, but against a tight opponent it’s a mistake. Tighter players generally only play back with about the top 15% or so, and K8 isn’t doing too well against that range. If you raise to 10k and BB shoves, you’re getting about 2-1, and you need to assume he’s shoving down to A2+, 22+ and JT+ to make the call correct with K8.

Next up, raising and folding. This is usually a poor choice against observant, aggressive, opponents who will re-raise you with a very wide range, but our scenario is a little different. You can assume a tighter player will probably only play back at you with the top 15% or so of hands. He’ll also call every once in awhile, but that’s fairly rare, so we won’t worry about it for now. So, 85% of the time you win 7300 and 15% of the time you lose 10k. The math is pretty simple:

EV = (.85 * 7300) + (.15 * -10000) = ~4700

That’s about 1.5 BBs. Not a bad pick up, and you risk 2.5 BBs. That’s a great ratio, and it puts very little of your stack in play. It is less of a pure gain than the shove, but the trade off is you really reduce your variance.

So what should we do?

It seems like the options come down to raise-fold and shove. Shoving has the highest pure return (2 BBs versus 1.5 BBs), but raise-fold has an awesome risk-reward ratio. Remember, raise-fold risks 2.5 to win 1.5, while shoving risks 12 to win 2. At this point in the tournament, a half of a BB just isn’t worth all that much to your stack – it won’t give you any additional options or really advance your chances of winning the tournament in any significant way. When that’s the case and you’re against a fairly predictable opponent, I’m always going to error on the side of reducing variance.

There’s a lot that goes on in blind versus blind play, and this hand is just one example of dozens of possible scenarios. Taking some time to break down a couple of those situations like we did in this article is a great exercise that can teach you some excellent lessons about the competing factors that play in to making the complex decision about what the optimal play actually is.