 |
Stealing the blinds in online cash games will lead to a fruitful and healthy poker future, argues Daniel Smyth.
What do Ali Baba, Ronnie Biggs and Thomas Blood (famous Crown Jewels nabber) all have to do with you getting better at poker? Answer: they were all thieves.
Now, I’m not advocating increasing your bankroll by nicking your opponents’ chips when they aren’t looking but what I am going to advise you to do is to become a blind thief. Emulating the likes of Biggs and Blood and becoming a blind pickpocket in most online low-limit cash games will help increase your overall win rate and boost your poker profits. So how do we best pinch our opponents’ pennies right from under their noses?
First off we need to identify our targets and whose blinds will be most profitable to steal. For the purposes of this article I will separate them into three simple categories: Tight, Standard and Loose. Or, more appropriately: The Pensioner, The Student and The Night Watchman.
The Pensioner
These are the players we most want on our left because, like your dear old granny, they can’t wait to give away their money. The pensioner easily forgets, gets confused when put under pressure and has a real problem with incontinence - of the chip variety, that is. The pensioner is acutely aware that they will be playing a hand out of position and therefore they will only play strong starting hands such as big pairs and big aces.
Using Pokerstove (a free downloadable EV calculator) we can say that if we think our opponent is only likely to play, on average, pocket pairs, tens and above, as well as A-Q and A-K (both suited and unsuited) then they are playing roughly the top 5% of hands. Now if we consider that there is roughly a 90% chance that the two players in the blinds will not have a hand within in range of 10-10+ and AQ+ then we can see intuitively that our raises are going to be successful a lot of the time, which in turn equals profit for us.
The Student
The student is the type of player who is a halfway house between the tight pensioner and the loose night watchman. The majority of the time the student is sensible and intelligent enough to not play too many hands out of position. However, they still posses the exuberance of youth and like to mix up their game by playing a wider range than our elderly opponents.
This player is likely to play all pairs, looking for set value, and any two broadway cards. Again, if we use Pokerstove we can see that with a hand range of 22+, JT+, QT+, KT+ and AT+ this player will be playing roughly 18% of all the possible hands which can be dealt in Hold’em. The odds our two remaining opponents won’t hold the range stated above is roughly 67%, so we can say that we will only expect to get called around 33% of the time. Therefore, for roughly every three steal attempts we make, two will get through uncontested.
The Night Watchman
The night watchman is the epitome of cynicism; they are always ready with their torch to question your raises. This type of player forgoes the virtues of not playing marginal hands out of position and lives by the motto, “In for a penny, in for a pound.” The range of hands that this player will play is likely to be very wide. They are fish, which makes pinning down what they hold difficult because a lot of the time it could literally be any two cards.
The one positive we have going for us here though is that this player is less likely to have a strong hand when they call and therefore less likely to make a strong enough hand on the flop to call our continuation bet. If we assume that this player loves pretty colours and plays any two suited cards, any aces, any pairs and any two broadway cards then they will playing roughly 46% of hands. There is around a 70% chance that one of the two remaining players in the blinds will hold a hand that falls within this specified range. However, as I mentioned, the equity we lose pre-flop can be gained post-flop against this player type, or in other words, although we will get called more pre-flop our opponent’s relatively weak hand strength will allow us to get more folds post-flop.
In order to help identify and categorise the players to your left it is crucial to use all the information at your disposal. This means paying attention to how often they call or re-raise pre-flop, how aggressive they are with their weak/strong hands and what hands they are taking all the way to a showdown.
In addition to good old-fashioned observation skills it is also useful to use a programme such as Poker Tracker or Hold’em Manager. Both of these programmes have integrated HUDs (Heads-Up Displays) which tell you important statistics such as how often they: fold to steal in the small blind and big blind, fold to a continuation bet, three-bet. Using these % stats in conjunction with your own reads will help you quickly identify if a player is loose or tight, as well as how aggressive they are. From there you can begin determining the average range of hands they like to play from the blinds and then use this information to help characterise them as a Pensioner, a Student or a Night Watchman.
Identifying which player types are on your left is crucial. However, what is also important to understand is your own image. Being a constant blind thief is going to earn you a reputation of an aggressive player and although weak players in the blinds are unlikely to adjust very well to your pressure, it is almost certain that they will adjust in some way, which usually means they will start to call more pre-flop. This isn’t a disaster though because not only do we have position in the hand but we also have the betting lead, thus we are able to continue to apply pressure post-flop. We also know that our opponent will miss the flop 2/3 of the time when they don’t hold a pocket pair, meaning we can take the pot down enough times with a continuation bet to make it a profitable strategy.
One thing to appreciate though is that this blind stealing strategy is ultimately a small-ball style. If we consider that our pre-flop raises are standard 3xBB raises then we should be making our continuation bets around two-thirds of the pot. Because we are playing a small-ball style and pinching cheap pots, it is important to believe our opponents when they start to get aggressive in a hand.
If, for example, a player has been folding 80% of the time when you raise then suddenly calls your pre-flop raise and either leads into you or check-raises you on the flop, then it’s almost certain they have a strong hand and this is a spot where you need to cut your losses and give them the pot. What is also important to appreciate is that as your aggression increases your fold equity decreases, which means that players are less likely to believe you when you flop a monster. This means you should be betting your monsters just as strongly as if you had nothing; this way you will be balancing your range as your opponent will not know if your bets mean you are weak or strong. |
