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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.
Poker Tournament Strategies To Improve Your Skill
Poker tournament strategies are used to beat a specific kind of opponent at any time. It is about adjusting one´s playing style so that one´s opponents have no idea about which hand a person holds right now.
For most people poker tournament strategies are something that doesn´t seem to be necessary. Because we are talking about professional poker in this article, it should be clear that a serious player needs a strategy in order to succeed with this kind of game. The main goal of poker is to make money, beat one´s opponent and win more hands on average than other players. But it´s about losing less money as well as it is about winning the biggest and most profitable pots in any game.
If you seat down at a poker tournament and grab your Kem cards, you have to know what to do next. Once the Kem cards are dealt, you have to have a clear concept about which hand you are playing in a specific spot. At the first it is recommended to only play well decided and planned hands in a tourney. Don´t go crazy and try to plan mediocre or bad hands just because you get impatient now. You must be patient, and start observing the opponents to your left and write. The best poker tournament strategies recommended starting observing 4 opponents at a time. When does your opponent fold, when does he bet, and when does he raise on the flop or turn? That is what you need to figure out.
It is smart to fold most of your dealt Kem cards at the beginning and start paying attention to the most active player at the table. Try to figure out how he plays a strong and weak hand. If you are not in a hand, folded your cards, you have to focus on putting him on a hand every single time. If he wins pots without having to show a hand, you have to figure out what he could have. Try to concentrate on how he reacts, what he does when he folds or bets etc. These are the master skills that you need to take control of if you want to be successful with poker tournament strategies. If you are looking into your Kem cards and decide to play a hand, make sure to play it wisely.
Once you get more experienced in tournaments and are able to estimate players rather quickly you can play a wider range of hands. But as long as that is not the case you need to fold most of your hands that are weak. The next time you pick your Kem cards and want to play a hand make sure to consider all of these poker tournament strategies recommended in this article.