Poker antes are changing a little recently in live games, to save the time of getting antes from every player, a lot of casinos are now just taking one larger ante from the player in the Big Blind or from the Button.

This can make it confusing as to how differently we should play with these new conditions, so let’s run through some pointers about it…

Should we defend our Big Blind wider?

The short answer is no, we would have paid the same amount in antes every single hand if we weren’t paying a big blind ante, so just because now we have paid the ante in one lump sum it doesn’t change our strategy for this hand alone. Once the chips are in the pot they are no longer ours, so just try not to think of it as the chips you added to the pot.

So when are there more chips in the pot?

There are going to be more chips in the pot in a big blind/button ante game when we are short-handed, so if we are playing 7 handed for example with blinds at 100/200 with a regular ante of 25 chips that would mean there is 475 chips in the pot to go after, however if we are playing the same game still 7 handed but with a big blind ante there will be 500 chips in the pot.

It’s worth noting that this can be different at many blind structures, certain players will get more aggressive during larger ante levels and open up a bigger range of hands due to this increase in pot size and play slightly more passively during a smaller ante level.

How are people adjusting?

Most live players now think that they have to defend their Big Blind much looser, this can be good and bad for us as hopefully now they will make more mistakes post flop, however once tighter players will now be defending Vs our steal attempts much more.

This can make our late position steals even more profitable however as most players post-flop will just look to hit the board to continue and just fold to any more aggression from us. Look to size down our bets against players like this and risk the minimum for when they are calling.

Does paying the ante ever affect us?

The most crucial times that we will want to be paying close attention to the new antes is when we are in early or mid position with a short stack, if we have 10 Big blinds in mid position, we only have a few more hands until we will have to pay 2 Big Blinds, blindly having to add 20% of our chips.

This means we will need to widen our shoving ranges from the Nash Charts which you can view here because we will shortly have a much shorter stack, if we let the Blinds pass through us we will then have 7.5bbs.

So for example whilst our ranges may look like 22+ A3s+ ATo+ KJo+ K9s+ Q9s+ J9s+ T8s+ 98s+ in order to move all in from early position with 10bbs. We may want to widen these ranges by a few holdings and include one or two hands on the bottom end of our ranges, so shove K8s and K7s for example, not just K9s+.