Today we are going to look at some Small blind strategy and how we can make more money playing a balanced game from the small blind.

We have constructed a Small Blind range chart for you to base your strategy upon, this is not this bible on how to play from the small blind, but it does make a nice basic strategy that you can slightly tweak to suit your needs, but more on that a little later in the post.

So as you can see there are 4 ways we will play our hands listed on the chart:

Hands that we will Fold are in white.

These are hands from 32o- J5o and make up the absolute bottom of our range, we are not going to want to play 100% of hands against most opponents as this will mean we will not have a strong enough range to play against their hands out of position.

Hands that we will Limp are in green.

This is a good portion of our range from 32s to hands as strong as A9s and trap hands like AA, KK and AKo.This allows us to have a balanced range that includes hands like 65s and 97o as well as strong hands like KTs and 77. What this means is that we can limp and call raises, if we raise with many of these holdings they will not fair well against a 3-bet and we will have play a bloated pot out of position. This way we can limp with many hands and call raises as well as sometimes reraise with the top of our range that includes trap hands like AA, KK and AKo.This range allows us to play post flop with a wide range so we are hard to play against post flop on many board textures.

Hands that we will Bluff Raise are in Blue.

This allows us to get value from the hands that don’t play so well post flop and we don’t want to limp and call a raise with as these holdings will serve us well in the shape of a steal raise.Made up of hands like 43s-J5s and offsuit combinations from 860-K30. We can get value in the way of raising these hands and looking to steal the pot preflop or with a C-bet on a board that favours the aggressor like A K 3 for example.We are going to be balanced in our raising range by raising these hands as steals as well as having a Value raise range, this makes our raises hard to play against as we could have the top 10% of our hands or the top 10%, this is how we want to play poker, leaving our opponents guessing at all times and not letting them make perfect decisions.

Hands we will Value Raise are in Pink.

Strong hands like our pairs 88–QQ, suited combinations from QJs-AKs and our offsuit combos like KJo-AQo make a perfect value raising range.We are simply looking to raise the pot for value against our opponents likely much weaker range, this will let them make the mistake of calling with much worse hands and then we get to play for a bigger pot with a big range advantage.When raising in the Small blind we are not going to want to make it a normal 2.2x raise with either our value hands or bluff raises, we want to give our opponents a bad price to call so they are not getting the right math on calling with weak hands. Without antes a 3x raise is suitable however when antes are in play we are going to look to raise more along the lines of 4x.