In tournament Poker you are quite often going to find yourself defending your blinds, we talked about this in a previous strategy post which you can read HERE

In the Big Blind, you will always be getting a fairly good price to defend even the widest of hands especially with antes in play.

When it is folded to the Small Blind, there are some more benefits, whereas when we defend our hands against late position raises we are playing out of position for the rest of the hand, against the Small Blind giving us action however, we will be in position for the rest of the hand…

This is a huge advantage as we will be able to represent so many different types of hands and take away pots when our opponents haven’t got the heart to continue, let’s look at some tips we have compiled to improve your game in the Blinds…

The Math of the Big Blind Calls

Let’s look at some pot odds on calling hands in the Big Blind…

200/400 with 40 ante
On a 9 Player table, there will be 960 in the pot before any preflop action
Folded to Blinds…
SB: Raises to 1000
BB: ?

We would be getting 600 into 1960 which is the size of the pot at the moment.

What are our pot odds here…

We need to divide 600/1960 = 0.3061 then x100 gives us the percentage which in this case is 30.6%

This means to make this call profitably, in the long run, we will need to win the pot 30% of the time in order to call here… less than 1/3 times… with our positional advantage this means we are going to play nearly our whole range to a raise similar to this, the math will look different against much larger raises, however, so be wary of calculating your odds against a 5x raise for example.

Know when to attack limps

We are going to want to build the pot in the Big blind against limps from the small blind with a polarised range.

What does this mean?
We are going to want to either be bluffing or have a strong hand, this accomplishes a few things, we will stay balanced and thus unpredictable, we can remain profitable with steals as well as occasionally building the pot for value.

We will want to try and raise passive players with the bottom end of our range to get value from our junk hands preflop in the way of winning the pot right there with a steal.

However, we will want to tread a little more carefully against aggressive players as they may be looking to limp raise us out of the pot.

What hands are we not going to want to raise Vs Limps?
Well it makes less sense to raise with our playable middling hands like medium suited connectors like 67s and decent one broadway type hands like Q9o for example because we don’t want to risk getting blown off the pot when we are fairly high in our range but can’t call further action if our opponent is looking to limp raise… Whereas if we get limp raised and we have the bottom of our range, we have an easy fold and again if we have the top of our range we are more than happy to put in more action.

How to react against checks post flop

So if we have gotten to a flop and our opponent has checked to us, what next?
Well, we are not going to want to bet too often in general unless we are looking to exploit a player that is going to over fold, equities in Blind vs Blind pots are going to be a dead heat with both us and our opponent having any two cards.

We will want to base most of our decisions post flop on how capable our opponent is, are they going to station us? Are they going to over fold? Will they be tricky enough to check-raise with their bluffs? These are some good questions to ask before bloating the pot as we don’t want to get blown off our equity by an aggressive player.

How to play against a C-bet

Often our opponents’ entry to the Blind Vs Blind pot will be a limp and then C-bet or a raise preflop, then C-bet.

What kind of hands are we looking to continue with against these bets?
We will want to continue with a vast portion of our range including any pairs, any draws, even any backdoor draws as well as high card hands like floating with King and Queen high.

The reason for this is that we can turn good cards for our range and take the pot down against checks, without making our hand…

We are not going to gain enough information from just one bet from our opponent, we will want to see if they are going to fire even one more barrel on the turn. As a very profitable play can be to float flop bets and steal the pot on the turn, as it becomes very hard for our opponent to call even with a decent amount of showdown and they have to fold 100% of their bluffs at this point, even when we show up with a bluff here, it will buy us action for future pots when we may just be betting to protect our good hand on the turn.