Too many players play far too tight from the Big Blind! This is a classic beginners mistake, this is the spot where you are getting the best odds for playing a great deal of your range profitably.

Undefending your Big Blind will lead to good players capitalising on this and look to raise your Blinds with any two cards. Whereas playing too many hands from the blinds can be a problem realising your equity with sub-par holdings.

So, how do we correctly play from the Big Blind?

The first thing we are going to want to take into account is our opponents’ range, we are going to want to defend tighter against early position opens where our opponents are going to have tight ranges including premium hands. On the other side of the stick is when aggressive players are opening from late position, then we are not going to need much of a hand to play against them profitably.

We are going be getting good pot odds a lot of the time in the Big Blind, for instance, if we have to call $1 to win a pot of $2, we are getting 2/1 and only need to win the pot 33.3% of the time to be able to continue to call in this spot over time.

We also need to keep in mind how well we will realise our equity with our various holdings, some of our weakest defends may include hands like 7♠ 6♣ for example which against a holding like Q♥ Q♦ will have equity of 18.78%…

However, this is not strictly true as many times our hand will just miss the flop and we will not realise the full equity of playing with all 5 hole cards.

What kind of hands should we be defending from the Big Blind?

Well we can easily look at playing around 50% of our hands against most late position opens as with blinds and antes in the pot we will always be getting a good price to call raises, especially smaller raises such as 2.1x for example.

This is what 48% on hands looks like, this is a rough guide on opening up your range from the big blind, against late position raises, we can play even wider than this against button opens, with hands as T3s and 63s in the mix of holdings we can play profitably.

Now, this doesn’t mean that you can just go calling any raise with Q3s and you will always be a winning player but when our opponents’ ranges are wide, we must widen our ranges that we are playing back at them with, otherwise we are just being exploited. So the best way to get your feet wet with this type of strategy is to start adding in hands you wouldn’t have defended with before and see how it affects your game, so if previously you were only defending with K9o and T9s for example, add in hands of K8o and K7o and T8s and T7s, make small adjustments to your game to work in some more post flop play against aggressive players.

Play wider with antes

Be mindful of playing without antes in tournaments, before these set in we should be playing a much tighter range, as we will be getting much worse pot odds on calls even from the Big Blind let’s look at the differences:

25/50 with no ante
Button: Raises to 150
SB: Folds
BB: ?

We would be getting 1oo into 225 which is the size of the pot at the moment.
What are our pot odds here… well we need to divide 100/325 = 0.30 meaning we need to win the pot 30% of the time in order to be profitable here.

Compare this to a game with running antes…

100/200 with 20 ante
On a 9 Player table this means there will be 480 in the pot before any action
Button: Raises to 420
SB: Folds
BB: ?

We would be getting 220 into 900 which is the size of the pot at the moment.
What are our pot odds here… well we need to divide 220/1120 = 0.1964 meaning we need to win the pot around 19% of the time in order to be profitable with antes in play.