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Poker Tips for Beginners (Part 2): Blind Stealing
If it folds to you in late position and you decide to open for a raise, then a large portion of your profits will usually come from the times the blinds fold. Being able to accurately assess the conditions for stealing blinds will allow you to add a lot of money to your win-rate without much effort. The idea behind poker tips for beginners should be to make the most money with the least amount of complicated poker theory, and a basic understanding of stealing blinds achieves just that.
On the most basic level, everyone left to act will fold some percentage of the time on average. If everyone folds often enough, then you can be raising with any two cards. For example, if you open raise to three times the big blind, and everyone folds a total of 70%, then that means 70% of the time you win 1.5 big blinds, and 30% of the time you lose 3 big blinds. If we plug that into an EV equation, we get the following:
EV = 0.70(1.5) + 0.30(-3)
EV = 1.05 – 0.90
EV = 0.15
So on average, your blind steal by itself is worth 0.15 big blinds. That might not seem like much, but remember that if the blinds were $1/2, that’s $0.30 made from one action. If you had this chance every hand, you’d be making $30 per 100 hands just from blind stealing.
There are a few general factors we can think about that contribute to the EV of a blind steal. First is how the people left to act tend to play. In general, people who fold a lot are gold to our left, and people who 3-bet a lot aren’t much fun to have on our left. People who call a lot can be good or bad depending on how they play after the flop, and whether or not we have position.
Another important factor for consideration is the size of our raise. If we raise to four times the big blind, we need our opponents to fold a lot more than if we raise to three times the big blind. Against the right opponents, it can even be correct to minraise pre-flop, as long as we’re in position. Open minraising from the small blind is pretty terrible since the big blind is getting 3:1 to see a flop, meaning he will call a huge percentage of the time, and he will have position for the rest of the hand, which puts us at a huge disadvantage post-flop.