The purpose of this thread is to provide some analysis of the Poker Tracker stats that new players post when they ask for a check-up. If you want to be playing a tight/aggressive style, and if your stats deviate from the stats analyzed in this thread, it is probably for one of the reasons described. Do the legwork in poker tracker, analyze your hand histories, and post specific hands that might be symptomatic of your leaks. If you read this, there should not be any reason for you to post a stat check-up; you should have more specific questions that are better addressed as hand history posts.
This is the classic 2+2 post on Poker Tracker stats
INTRO
Your Poker Tracker stats do not matter in and of themselves. Rather, they are describing the way you play. If you learn to listen to what your Poker Tracker stats are saying, and adjust appropriately, you will play better, up to a point.
Here are some stats from two good Tags at NL $50 and $100:
Baja 15's stats
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chargers in 07’s stats
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As you can see, their stats are different, but they share certain characteristics that show that they are playing solid, tight/aggressive poker. Here is what chargers’ and baja’s stats are saying:
1. Seizing initiative:
baja15 is winning at 17.5/13.5. chargers in o7 is winning at 13.4/11. The specific numbers are not important; what is important is that both chargers and baja are almost always raising the pots they play. Seizing the initiative is crucial to winning at tight/aggressive poker. They have the table reacting to them. When they call, which is usually about 3.5% of the pots, they have a reason for doing so. If chargers or baja went back through all the hands they called a PFR with, they would be able to tell you why they did it every time. And they would never say “well, because KQ is playable in MP” or something vague like that. It would be “because I was getting the implied odds to play 33 for a set here—villain is a 10/2 nit with 100bb who only raises UTG with premium hands; I knew I’d get at least a big part of his stack if I hit my set.”
The bottom line here is that by raising when you enter a pot, you seize the initiative. If you are not raising about 2/3 of the hands you play, you are playing too passively.
2. Positional awareness:
The closer they are to the button, the more hands chargers and baja play. They understand that a hand that is junk in EP (ATo) becomes a raising hand when it is folded to them in LP. This is applied probability—the chance that someone behind you has a better hand increases when there are more players behind you. Say you are first to act of 9 players. There are 8 behind you. If you have Q7s (the hand that is the median hand in NLHE), on average 4 players behind you will have a better hand and 4 will have worse. If you are UTG with ATo, a top 1/3-ish hand, you can expect about 2-3 players to have a better hand. So you fold it. That same hand, OTB, when it has been folded to you, rates to be the best of the 3 remaining hands. So you raise. In EP Tags usually raise with premium hands plus a few hands that fit their preferred style of play (all pocket pairs, suited or connected paint) and fold everything else. They loosen their starting requirements progressively to the point that in the CO and OTB the fact that they are in position is as important as the cards they happen to have been dealt.
Notice how baja and chargers’ cold called a PFR% increases as they approach the button. They become more willing to call a preflop raise as their position improves, because they know they can win some hands by using position even when they don’t make a hand. Out of position, they are ruthless in applying raise or fold to their hand selection. OOP they have to take the initiative; in position, they look for spots to use position to use another player’s aggression against him.
If you do not have a similar ratio, you should be playing fewer hands UTG and more OTB.
3. Blind stealing.
This subject blends into positional awareness. In addition to raising for value with decent hands that you expect to be the favorite, you should raise with some hands you would ordinarily fold, hoping that it gets folded around. For an excellent discussion of blind stealing, carefully study and apply Pokey's and Dan Bitel’s advice on blind stealing. chargers has achieved what Pokey thinks is the optimal 30% steal percentage, and Baja is right there, too. Pokey does the math on how profitable this can be, and baja and chargers sure look like solid evidence Pokey is right. Pokey also talks about what hands are good stealing hands.
The combination of raising for value in LP with hands that you fold in EP and raising with folding hands to steal the blinds should get your CO and OTB VPIP up above 20%, and closer to 30% is probably best for experienced players.
4. Postflop Aggression.
chargers’ AF is 4.48. PT calculates your AF by adding the number of times you bet to the number of times you raise, and dividing this sum by the number of times you call. chargers bets or raises 4.5 times as often as he calls.
Your total AF doesn’t tell the whole story, though. Look at chargers’ aggression by street—he is way more aggressive on the flop (6.3) than he is on the river (2.29). This high AF means:
He decides on the flop whether and how he will play the hand. One way you increase your aggression factor is to fold to flop bets. chargers probably never says to himself “hmm, ok, I’ll call and we’ll see what he does on the turn.” He puts his opponent on a range preflop based on his opponent’s action. Then he looks at what his opponent does on the flop, and adjusts the range. If he decides to play, he bets or raises six times as often as he calls on the flop, and over twice as often on later streets. He can be this aggressive because he folds on the flop when he thinks the flop hit his opponent’s range pretty hard while missing him.
chargers does not slow play often. Slow playing trashes your aggression factor. Chargers has internalized the correct strategy of betting out or raising with strong hands most of the time. If your aggression factor is under 3, go back and study your monsters and check to see how often you are slow playing them. You shouldn’t be, very often, and you should always have a very player or board specific reason for doing so. If you can’t list those reasons off the top of your head right now, you should search the forum and learn when it is appropriate to slow play. On the other hand, you should be calling so few bets that slow playing monsters represents a significant fraction of your total number of calls.
If chargers plays a draw, he plays it aggressively. Check/calling oop or calling in position when you have a draw will drag down your aggression factor. Again, we don’t care about the aggression factor per se, but we do care that it may be telling us that we are not playing draws aggressively. Betting or raising with very good draws gives you two ways to win the pot, but just calling with them means you are playing fit or fold—you have to make your hand to have a chance of winning the pot. By betting out with his very good draws a lot of the time he decides to play them, chargers is winning a lot of them without ever making his draw. By folding his decent draws in the face of big bets and lots of aggression, he is saving money on draws that are too marginal to bet or raise with against a determined opponent, and these folds will also increase his aggression factor.
The lower your aggression factor, the more likely it is that you are making the common mistakes that Chargers does not make very often (calling to see what happens next or because you are unsure of where you are, slow playing too much, and not playing draws aggressively). Read this, too
5. WTSD%, W$WSF, W$SD: These stats come the closest of all stats to having hard and fast rules associated with them. As a general rule, winning players usually:
Go to showdown about 25% of the time
Win when they see the flop at least 35% of the time
Win at showdown between 45 and 48% of the time OR between 52 and 55% of the time.
WTSD%:
If this stat is too far from 25%, it could indicate several different problems. You could either be not betting enough on later streets when you are ahead, or you could be calling too much behind. Usually, when this stat is off, it is both. Your by street aggression factor is a huge tell here. If you are below 2 on any street, you are going for pot control too much (usually on the turn and the river). Make your read on the flop—if you are behind with little chance to improve, fold on the flop. If you think you are ahead or have a strong draw—bet or raise a lot, and win the hand before the river (if you are actually behind, your opponent WILL let you know, normally by sliding it far to the right and clicking). Either way, it is a hand that doesn’t go to showdown. If you think your opponent has a decent hand, fold or raise—either get out or try to push him off his marginal hand. Either way it is a hand that doesn’t go to showdown.
The correct action on the river is a very complicated subject, but, in general, if you are checking behind a lot in position, you are increasing your WSD% by failing to bet and induce a fold from an opponent who checked to you. Only check behind when there are very few or no hands that you beat that would call a bet. If your WSD% is too high, you need to use Poker Tracker and Poker EV to look at the hands where you did not bet the river and won. Then, in the future, you bet in similar situations. Your opponents will fold a lot, and you will decrease your WSD%. Then you need to find hands where you called on the river and lost. Among these hands, you will find hands where it was correct to have folded on an earlier street, maybe even preflop. Do so in future similar situations, and you will decrease your WSD% and increase your winrate by winning more when you are good, and losing less when you are behind.
If you make these adjustments, you will be playing better, and, incidentally, you will see the change reflected in your WSD%
W$WSF%.
If you are not winning at least 35% of the hands you see the flop, there are 3 possible problems, all of which will need examination:
You are playing marginal hands too much. 97s or 22 are great hands to speculate with in ideal situations (deep, multiway and in position), but win like 12% of the time. If you play these hands indiscriminately, it will show up as a lower W$WSF%
You are getting blown off hands by aggression. Remember, most flops miss most players.
You are not winning pots based on position and you are not c-betting enough.
All 3 of these are symptomatic of “fit or fold,” poker, which is –EV poker.
W$atSD
There are two approaches Tags take to showdown. Both are profitable, but they show up as different ranges of winning at SD:
Tags who border on loose aggressive play generally win less than 50% of their showdowns. This reflects the fact that they are pushing very hard, often all in, with good draws or marginal hands, relying on their opponents’ willingness to fold as much as the quality of their hands to win pots. They frequently make big bets when they know they are behind but have outs, hoping for a fold, but knowing they have plenty of cards as outs if they get called. Here’s an example of a Lag sample from ship_it_trebek that shows you can achieve a nice winrate even when you lose most showdowns:
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If you play a typical Tag style, you should be above 50%. If you are not, you have to go back through and look for patterns in your river decisions to find the recurring mistakes (there WILL be recurring mistakes, most likely calling a big river bet with TPGK or an overpair). If your W$atSD is too high (yes, it is possible) it means that you almost have to be folding the best hand too often.
Conclusion
I am up against the max word count and there’s a ton I had to cut to get this much done. I’ll ask the experienced players to add their thoughts on some of the things I didn’t get to, such as defending blinds, and to point out any mistakes I made.
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Taking stealing the blinds to next level
OK, First, if you haven't already, read Pokey's Brilliant post on blind stealing, read it now.
Secondly, what I'm about to write is not for every1. Unlike blind stealing, you don't HAVE to do this to play optimal poker. I know that a lot of good players/respected posters do this already and some don't like it at all.
OK, what you have to realise is quite how +EV blind stealing is. Check you BB/100 when blind stealing in PT. I'm sure that for most of you it's bigger than 60 PTBB/100, now that a hell of a lot of $$$$!!!! The reason for this is in a way, NLTH is a badly structured game in the way that when you play without antes, the blinds are at such a disadvantage, they have to post their blind without even seeing their hand. Now considering that a good TAG player will normally only play about 20% of their hands, this means that on the BB , they're losing 4BB every 5 hands, that they normally wouldn't put in.
OK, so lets say you're on the button and MP limps to you. You have K 2 , what should you normally do? Well folding certainly doesn't look too bad. We've got a poor hand after all. What do I think you should do? RAISE THAT [censored]!!!
Reasons:
1) now, yourblind steal doen't even look like a blind steal, so it's less likely the blinds will see it as that and play back at you.
2) It's scary the amount of times that I've seen people limp/fold preflop, even from CO. It kinda baffles me realy!! What kind of hand can they have?
3) What do you opponents limp with? This is a very important consideration. Normally, either trash/SC/PP. These hands miss the flop very often. So even if you do get called, they won't continue after your flop cbet very often.
4) When we take it down preflop, we now win 2.5BB. Thats over 100PTBB/100.....freakdaddy, we'll catch you yet
5) We'll get paid off more on our big hands.
6) Our oppponents are plays sub-optimally by open limping. So by raising, we are punishing that mistake.
Next, lets think about what will happen after we make this play a few times. Well, either you're at a table of mega mega unobservant fish and you just keep raking in the money from their limps. Or maybe you're sitting at a table of just mega unobservant fish, and they realise what you're doing and they stop limping. Well, is this a good thing or a bad thing? I think in a way, its a VERY good thing. It means 1) they will be folding more, so you can steal the blinds more, which as we've already discussed is $$$$$$. 2) They will be raising more and will be out of their comfort zone. This means they will usually make even bigger mistakes than usual as they try to adjust
Next, what hands should you be doing this with? After how many limpers? After what sort of limpers.
IMO, you should do it with your normal blind stealing range, so SC, unsuited connectors, suited 1 gappers, Axs, Kxs, low PP etc etc.
No. of limpers: normally 1 or 2, but sometimes more if conditions allow
The type of limpers: the ones that like to fold, eihter preflop or 2 cbets.
Lastly, the problems with this:
1) If you do this too often, you'll find that you open up your game tooo much and start raising poor hands OOP too and get into trouble.
2) watch out for LRR
3) You'll be put in a lot more marginal situations post-flop, so you need to make sure your reasing skills are goot.
IMO, playing a huge range of hands from the button after 0 or 1 (and even 2 limpers), raising them all and then from all other positions just play pairs/big aces/KQ is a simpleish but very profitable strategy
Secondly, what I'm about to write is not for every1. Unlike blind stealing, you don't HAVE to do this to play optimal poker. I know that a lot of good players/respected posters do this already and some don't like it at all.
OK, what you have to realise is quite how +EV blind stealing is. Check you BB/100 when blind stealing in PT. I'm sure that for most of you it's bigger than 60 PTBB/100, now that a hell of a lot of $$$$!!!! The reason for this is in a way, NLTH is a badly structured game in the way that when you play without antes, the blinds are at such a disadvantage, they have to post their blind without even seeing their hand. Now considering that a good TAG player will normally only play about 20% of their hands, this means that on the BB , they're losing 4BB every 5 hands, that they normally wouldn't put in.
OK, so lets say you're on the button and MP limps to you. You have K 2 , what should you normally do? Well folding certainly doesn't look too bad. We've got a poor hand after all. What do I think you should do? RAISE THAT [censored]!!!
Reasons:
1) now, yourblind steal doen't even look like a blind steal, so it's less likely the blinds will see it as that and play back at you.
2) It's scary the amount of times that I've seen people limp/fold preflop, even from CO. It kinda baffles me realy!! What kind of hand can they have?
3) What do you opponents limp with? This is a very important consideration. Normally, either trash/SC/PP. These hands miss the flop very often. So even if you do get called, they won't continue after your flop cbet very often.
4) When we take it down preflop, we now win 2.5BB. Thats over 100PTBB/100.....freakdaddy, we'll catch you yet
5) We'll get paid off more on our big hands.
6) Our oppponents are plays sub-optimally by open limping. So by raising, we are punishing that mistake.
Next, lets think about what will happen after we make this play a few times. Well, either you're at a table of mega mega unobservant fish and you just keep raking in the money from their limps. Or maybe you're sitting at a table of just mega unobservant fish, and they realise what you're doing and they stop limping. Well, is this a good thing or a bad thing? I think in a way, its a VERY good thing. It means 1) they will be folding more, so you can steal the blinds more, which as we've already discussed is $$$$$$. 2) They will be raising more and will be out of their comfort zone. This means they will usually make even bigger mistakes than usual as they try to adjust
Next, what hands should you be doing this with? After how many limpers? After what sort of limpers.
IMO, you should do it with your normal blind stealing range, so SC, unsuited connectors, suited 1 gappers, Axs, Kxs, low PP etc etc.
No. of limpers: normally 1 or 2, but sometimes more if conditions allow
The type of limpers: the ones that like to fold, eihter preflop or 2 cbets.
Lastly, the problems with this:
1) If you do this too often, you'll find that you open up your game tooo much and start raising poor hands OOP too and get into trouble.
2) watch out for LRR
3) You'll be put in a lot more marginal situations post-flop, so you need to make sure your reasing skills are goot.
IMO, playing a huge range of hands from the button after 0 or 1 (and even 2 limpers), raising them all and then from all other positions just play pairs/big aces/KQ is a simpleish but very profitable strategy
Blind Stealing.
Well, if somebody hadn't changed my title, I'd be a Pooh-Bah now. Due to some…er, “irrational exuberance” on my part, I’m forced to make a SECOND Pooh-bah post. I haven’t had quite as much time to think about it the second time around, but I’ve decided to address an important and often-misunderstood topic in small-stakes no-limit poker: blind stealing. To those of you who consider blind stealing an insignificant part of the no-limit poker game, or perhaps just an “image move” to help get paid off on your big hands, think again – blind stealing can be an extremely valuable part of your poker arsenal.
I’ll admit it: I’m a ruthless, heartless, helpless, hopeless, habitual blind thief. I stole blinds when I played limit hold’em, I stole blinds when I played tournaments, I steal blinds when I play no-limit hold’em. I’ve stolen blinds from my eight-year-old cousin and from an 85-year-old great-grandmother. I steal blinds when I’m playing my 16/9 full-ring TAG game and I steal blinds when I’m playing my 35/20 6-max LAG game. I’ve always stolen blinds, and I always will.
Furthermore, I’m reasonably good at it. In the last 17,500 hands, I’ve attempted to steal the blinds a whopping 38.31% of the time – that works out to be 313 steal attempts out of 817 opportunities. Over those 313 blind-steal attempts, I’ve maintained a healthy win rate of 1.10 PTBB/hand: that’s 110 PTBB/100. Despite the fact that I’ve only attempted a blind steal one time every five orbits, those steal attempts have generated over 30% of my total profits at the no-limit poker tables. Like I said: done right, blind stealing is a VERY important contributor to your overall win rate.
So, now that I’ve got your attention, let’s turn to the issue at hand: how do you steal the blinds successfully? What’s the formula, what’s the method, what’s the approach? The answer is that it’s quite easy, and despite that, it’s wildly successful.
Pokey’s Rules for Blind Theft:
1. Know yourself and know your target. Blind steals rely heavily on folding equity. The more frequently you try to steal the blinds, the weaker the average hand you’ll have when you attempt a steal. That means that for the frequent blind thief, you’re hoping NOT to get to a showdown. The good news is that the odds of your remaining opponents having a decent hand are slim – there are only two or three players left to act, and they have random hands. The odds none of the remaining players have “good” hands are as follows:
- “Super Premium Hand,” AA-JJ, AK: 94.1% chance with two players left to act, and 91.3% chance with three players left to act.
- “Premium Hand,” AA-TT, AK, AQ: 90.8% chance with two players left to act, and 86.6% chance with three players left to act.
- “Great Hand,” AA-99, AK, AQ, KQ: 87.8% chance with two players left to act, and 82.3% chance with three players left to act.
- “Very Good Hand,” all Great Hands plus 88, AJ: 84.6% chance with two players left to act, and 77.9% chance with three players left to act.
- “Good Hand,” any pair, any two broadway: 67.4% chance with two players left to act, and 55.3% chance with three players left to act.
- “Above Average Hand,” any ace, any suited, any pair, any two broadway: 29.5% chance with two players left to act, and 16% chance with three players left to act.
Note what this means: the “looser” your remaining opponents, the harder it will be to successfully steal the blinds preflop. If your blind steals are a standard 4xBB, then you will wager 4xBB to win 1.5xBB, so if you immediately win 3 times out of 11 you will show an immediate preflop profit, even if you never win a hand when you don’t win preflop. Since 3 out of 11 is 27.3%, if our opponents are likely to fold 72.7% of the time, we win immediately. So against players who will only play “very good hands” versus a steal attempt, you should be stealing with literally any two cards from either BB or CO, and doing so will show an instant profit even before the flop. Of course, the hand range your opponent will consider worthy of a preflop call will expand as you attempt steals more frequently, so you need to remain aware of both your table image and your opponent’s play style.
2. Aggression, aggression, aggression. When you get called preflop, this is not a tragedy – it’s an opportunity. Most opponents crumble quickly against steady aggression; to successfully steal blinds, we need to apply that steady aggression. However, we need to do so CAREFULLY so as to make sure that our attempts are profitable. The flop is going to improve our hand about one time in three. Let’s assume that when we’re called, we’re typically behind. This will be the case when we are relentless with our steal attempts and our opponents are conservative with their calls. While this sounds like a recipe for bankruptcy, it’s actually not bad at all. Consider that even if our opponent is playing as incredibly tight, some of his hand range will include unpaired preflop hands like AK. So, what are the odds that by the flop our opponent’s hand is at least strong enough to beat unimproved pocket deuces?
- If our opponent is only playing “Super Premium Hands,” his hand on the flop will beat unimproved pocket deuces 73% of the time.
- If our opponent is playing “Premium Hands,” his hand on the flop will beat unimproved pocket deuces 64% of the time.
- If our opponent is playing “Great Hands,” his hand on the flop will beat unimproved pocket deuces 59.4% of the time.
- If our opponent is playing “Very Good Hands,” his hand on the flop will beat unimproved pocket deuces 56.7% of the time.
- If our opponent is playing “Good Hands,” his hand on the flop will beat unimproved pocket deuces 49% of the time.
- If our opponent is playing “Above Average Hands,” his hand on the flop will beat unimproved pocket deuces 40.1% of the time.
Now we get into the art of blind stealing: how large should our flop bet be? We want to make sure our flop bet is at the same size whether we’ve flopped well or not, but we’re balancing competing issues: how often our opponent will improve, how often we will have a strong hand, how often our opponent will improve and still fold, how often our opponent will improve and we’ll improve more, how often we’ll improve but our opponent will improve more, etc. As complicated as this all sounds, we’ve got a few things going for us: namely, that we have played the hand aggressively so far and that we will have position on this and every remaining street in the hand.
For people who steal infrequently (say, 20% of the time or less), your flop bets should be sizeable. Given that you are only attempting a steal 20% of the time, you will be stealing with reasonably solid hands yourself: collectively, all suited aces, any pair, and any two broadway cards make up 20.4% of possible holdings, meaning that your hand on the flop will beat unimproved pocket deuces 47.6% of the time. The odds that your hand is worth pursuing is therefore significant enough to warrant a full pot-sized continuation bet from you; if your opponent folds, great, and if not, you have a valuable hand often enough to make this a highly profitable hand for you.
However, I don’t recommend stealing “only” 20% of the time. I recommend stealing much more often than that. As an example, my steal rate of 38.3% corresponds roughly to stealing with “any pair, any ace, any king, any two broadway cards, and any suited connector down to 87s.” If that’s your steal range, the chances that on the flop you have at least a pair will be noticeably lower (something like 42.8%). The answer is not to bet less often on the flop; rather, the answer is to bet a smaller quantity on the flop. While a pot-sized bet needs to win 50% of the time to be immediately profitable, a 2/3-pot sized bet only needs to win 40% of the time to be immediately profitable.
Notice what this means: if your opponent plays very tightly against your preflop raise, the odds that he has a decent hand on the flop go up, lowering the value of your flop bets. However, the odds that he CALLS your preflop bet go DOWN, raising the value of your PREFLOP bets. At this stage of the hand, we’ve already had two chances to win the pot: one if our opponent folds to the preflop bet and one if our opponent folds to the flop bet.
Consider the value of a steal attempt from the big blind against the various opponents, assuming they will (a) fold preflop if their hand is outside of the specified range (winning 0.75 PTBBs), and (b) only call the flop with a hand that can beat 22 (when they fold, we win 2.75 PTBBs, and when they fold, we lose 5.5 PTBBs). This assumes our betting is 2 PTBB preflop and 3.5 PTBB on the flop. If we consider only the tightest and loosest opponents, we see this:
- Super Premium Hands: 94.1% of the time they fold preflop, 27% of the time they fold on the flop.
EV = 0.941*(+0.75) + (0.059*0.27)*(+2.75) + (0.059*0.73)*(-5.5) = +0.51 PTBB.
- Premium Hands: 90.8% of the time they fold preflop, 36% of the time they fold on the flop.
EV = 0.908*(+0.75) + (0.092*0.36)*(+2.75) + (0.092*0.64)*(-5.5) = +0.45 PTBB.
Skipping ahead to the loosest players:
- Good Hands: 67.4% of the time they fold preflop, 51% of the time they fold on the flop.
EV = 0.674*(+0.75) + (0.326*0.51)*(+2.75) + (0.326*0.49)*(-5.5) = +0.08 PTBB.
- Above Average Hands: 29.5% of the time they fold preflop, 59.9% of the time they fold on the flop.
EV = 0.295*(+0.75) + (0.705*0.599)*(+2.75) + (0.705*0.401)*(-5.5) = -0.17 PTBB.
Once again, this demonstrates a bizarre truism: the less likely your opponent is to fold, the less profitable your blind-stealing will prove to be in terms of folding equity. Note well two points, however: first, this assumes that our opponent is calling EVERY time he has a hand that is at least as strong as a pair of deuces; thus, the opponent holding 22 on a board of AKQ is assumed to call our continuation bet. Also, our EV calculations have thus far assumed that whenever we have not won with the flop bet, we lose every time. This should prove FAR from true, especially against the loosest of our opponents. A safe bet is that we will win at LEAST 1/3 of the time when our flop bet is called, and that safely makes all of these calculations +EV.
After the flop, easy and simple rules must be thrown out the window. From here on in, there is too much “art” in the play to be easily categorized in a summary like this. I do want to point out a few simple points that might make help you in your blind-stealing adventures:
1. Much like bears in the woods, your opponents are more afraid of you than you are of them. This is your hand – you’ve raised preflop and bet the flop. You’re SCARY, here. Given that your opponent has exhibited NO aggression at this point, your folding equity remains solid. Use that ruthlessly. If a scare card hits on the turn and your opponent checks to you again, fire that second (third?) barrel! Don’t be afraid to bet the turn ace, the turn king, the turn pair, the turn flush card, the turn straight card, or the turn blank if you think your opponent is running scared. This is another place where knowing your enemy helps.
2. If your opponent gets aggressive, TRUST him. There is no shame in folding your blind steal attempt. If the flop comes A83r and your opponent bets the pot, or check-raises big, feel free to fold your KQo. In fact, feel OBLIGATED to do so. Blind stealing is decidedly a “small pot game” strategy; if you are risking your stack on a blind steal, you’ve screwed up big-time. Similarly, if you are stealing with total garbage (86s or some such) and someone reraises, GET OUT. Fold immediately, and without hesitation. Don’t bother seeing what the flop brings – there’s no profit in it.
3. Take free cards if they are beneficial to you. One strength of this strategy is that you’ll often have good draws on the flop, and your opponent will usually offer you a free card on the turn. If you’ve got a good draw, feel free to take it. Don’t ALWAYS take it, though – I’ve often fired another barrel with a hand like Tc9c when the board looked like QcJd4s4c. Not only did that turn card 4c improve my hand by giving me nine more outs, but it also scared the doody out of my opponent, making him think that I just turned trips. Why not take advantage of the fear? Instead of playing for my 2-to-1 draw, I can bet immediately and win the pot a significant chunk of the time, and STILL win 1/3 of the time at showdown (usually for even more money, since my opponent won’t see my straight or flush coming).
4. Don’t get discouraged if your steals fail. We’re often worried that because our opponent played back at us the last time we tried to steal, we need to tighten up considerably. Don’t. Our opponents don’t adjust NEARLY as much as we think they do. Just because you got reraised preflop the last time you tried to steal doesn’t mean that they’ve got your number; more likely, SB had AA when he fought back. Now he’s got 92o, and he does NOT have a pair of balls. Hit him again, and keep hitting him.
5. Know your image! While players don’t adjust very well or very far or very effectively, they DO adjust. If you’ve picked up the pot with preflop bets and flop bets the last four hands in a row, fold your 98s in the CO this time. You are not a slave to your cards; understand your table image, understand that your opponents are getting pissed off at you, and understand that your folding equity falls every additional time you win a pot without showing your cards. After you’ve folded preflop three or four times in a row, you can go back to stealing and bullying, but give your opponents a tiny chance to catch their breaths between steals.
6. DO NOT SLOWPLAY. I cannot emphasize this enough. Your entire strategy here is a bluff that depends entirely on your playing your monsters and your junk identically. There’s always the temptation when you have AA preflop and catch A55 on the flop to suddenly change gears. Don’t! With any luck, your opponent won’t believe you, and will call all-in with QQ unimproved. Not only will you stack him, but you’ll also get even more respect the next time you play fast on a board of A55…only this time you’ll have 98s….Fast play of big hands is CRUCIAL to the success of this strategy. Not only does it boost the shania of all your weak junk by elevating your folding equity, but it also gets paid off much more frequently than it would if you were only nut-peddling.
I’ll admit it: I’m a ruthless, heartless, helpless, hopeless, habitual blind thief. I stole blinds when I played limit hold’em, I stole blinds when I played tournaments, I steal blinds when I play no-limit hold’em. I’ve stolen blinds from my eight-year-old cousin and from an 85-year-old great-grandmother. I steal blinds when I’m playing my 16/9 full-ring TAG game and I steal blinds when I’m playing my 35/20 6-max LAG game. I’ve always stolen blinds, and I always will.
Furthermore, I’m reasonably good at it. In the last 17,500 hands, I’ve attempted to steal the blinds a whopping 38.31% of the time – that works out to be 313 steal attempts out of 817 opportunities. Over those 313 blind-steal attempts, I’ve maintained a healthy win rate of 1.10 PTBB/hand: that’s 110 PTBB/100. Despite the fact that I’ve only attempted a blind steal one time every five orbits, those steal attempts have generated over 30% of my total profits at the no-limit poker tables. Like I said: done right, blind stealing is a VERY important contributor to your overall win rate.
So, now that I’ve got your attention, let’s turn to the issue at hand: how do you steal the blinds successfully? What’s the formula, what’s the method, what’s the approach? The answer is that it’s quite easy, and despite that, it’s wildly successful.
Pokey’s Rules for Blind Theft:
1. Know yourself and know your target. Blind steals rely heavily on folding equity. The more frequently you try to steal the blinds, the weaker the average hand you’ll have when you attempt a steal. That means that for the frequent blind thief, you’re hoping NOT to get to a showdown. The good news is that the odds of your remaining opponents having a decent hand are slim – there are only two or three players left to act, and they have random hands. The odds none of the remaining players have “good” hands are as follows:
- “Super Premium Hand,” AA-JJ, AK: 94.1% chance with two players left to act, and 91.3% chance with three players left to act.
- “Premium Hand,” AA-TT, AK, AQ: 90.8% chance with two players left to act, and 86.6% chance with three players left to act.
- “Great Hand,” AA-99, AK, AQ, KQ: 87.8% chance with two players left to act, and 82.3% chance with three players left to act.
- “Very Good Hand,” all Great Hands plus 88, AJ: 84.6% chance with two players left to act, and 77.9% chance with three players left to act.
- “Good Hand,” any pair, any two broadway: 67.4% chance with two players left to act, and 55.3% chance with three players left to act.
- “Above Average Hand,” any ace, any suited, any pair, any two broadway: 29.5% chance with two players left to act, and 16% chance with three players left to act.
Note what this means: the “looser” your remaining opponents, the harder it will be to successfully steal the blinds preflop. If your blind steals are a standard 4xBB, then you will wager 4xBB to win 1.5xBB, so if you immediately win 3 times out of 11 you will show an immediate preflop profit, even if you never win a hand when you don’t win preflop. Since 3 out of 11 is 27.3%, if our opponents are likely to fold 72.7% of the time, we win immediately. So against players who will only play “very good hands” versus a steal attempt, you should be stealing with literally any two cards from either BB or CO, and doing so will show an instant profit even before the flop. Of course, the hand range your opponent will consider worthy of a preflop call will expand as you attempt steals more frequently, so you need to remain aware of both your table image and your opponent’s play style.
2. Aggression, aggression, aggression. When you get called preflop, this is not a tragedy – it’s an opportunity. Most opponents crumble quickly against steady aggression; to successfully steal blinds, we need to apply that steady aggression. However, we need to do so CAREFULLY so as to make sure that our attempts are profitable. The flop is going to improve our hand about one time in three. Let’s assume that when we’re called, we’re typically behind. This will be the case when we are relentless with our steal attempts and our opponents are conservative with their calls. While this sounds like a recipe for bankruptcy, it’s actually not bad at all. Consider that even if our opponent is playing as incredibly tight, some of his hand range will include unpaired preflop hands like AK. So, what are the odds that by the flop our opponent’s hand is at least strong enough to beat unimproved pocket deuces?
- If our opponent is only playing “Super Premium Hands,” his hand on the flop will beat unimproved pocket deuces 73% of the time.
- If our opponent is playing “Premium Hands,” his hand on the flop will beat unimproved pocket deuces 64% of the time.
- If our opponent is playing “Great Hands,” his hand on the flop will beat unimproved pocket deuces 59.4% of the time.
- If our opponent is playing “Very Good Hands,” his hand on the flop will beat unimproved pocket deuces 56.7% of the time.
- If our opponent is playing “Good Hands,” his hand on the flop will beat unimproved pocket deuces 49% of the time.
- If our opponent is playing “Above Average Hands,” his hand on the flop will beat unimproved pocket deuces 40.1% of the time.
Now we get into the art of blind stealing: how large should our flop bet be? We want to make sure our flop bet is at the same size whether we’ve flopped well or not, but we’re balancing competing issues: how often our opponent will improve, how often we will have a strong hand, how often our opponent will improve and still fold, how often our opponent will improve and we’ll improve more, how often we’ll improve but our opponent will improve more, etc. As complicated as this all sounds, we’ve got a few things going for us: namely, that we have played the hand aggressively so far and that we will have position on this and every remaining street in the hand.
For people who steal infrequently (say, 20% of the time or less), your flop bets should be sizeable. Given that you are only attempting a steal 20% of the time, you will be stealing with reasonably solid hands yourself: collectively, all suited aces, any pair, and any two broadway cards make up 20.4% of possible holdings, meaning that your hand on the flop will beat unimproved pocket deuces 47.6% of the time. The odds that your hand is worth pursuing is therefore significant enough to warrant a full pot-sized continuation bet from you; if your opponent folds, great, and if not, you have a valuable hand often enough to make this a highly profitable hand for you.
However, I don’t recommend stealing “only” 20% of the time. I recommend stealing much more often than that. As an example, my steal rate of 38.3% corresponds roughly to stealing with “any pair, any ace, any king, any two broadway cards, and any suited connector down to 87s.” If that’s your steal range, the chances that on the flop you have at least a pair will be noticeably lower (something like 42.8%). The answer is not to bet less often on the flop; rather, the answer is to bet a smaller quantity on the flop. While a pot-sized bet needs to win 50% of the time to be immediately profitable, a 2/3-pot sized bet only needs to win 40% of the time to be immediately profitable.
Notice what this means: if your opponent plays very tightly against your preflop raise, the odds that he has a decent hand on the flop go up, lowering the value of your flop bets. However, the odds that he CALLS your preflop bet go DOWN, raising the value of your PREFLOP bets. At this stage of the hand, we’ve already had two chances to win the pot: one if our opponent folds to the preflop bet and one if our opponent folds to the flop bet.
Consider the value of a steal attempt from the big blind against the various opponents, assuming they will (a) fold preflop if their hand is outside of the specified range (winning 0.75 PTBBs), and (b) only call the flop with a hand that can beat 22 (when they fold, we win 2.75 PTBBs, and when they fold, we lose 5.5 PTBBs). This assumes our betting is 2 PTBB preflop and 3.5 PTBB on the flop. If we consider only the tightest and loosest opponents, we see this:
- Super Premium Hands: 94.1% of the time they fold preflop, 27% of the time they fold on the flop.
EV = 0.941*(+0.75) + (0.059*0.27)*(+2.75) + (0.059*0.73)*(-5.5) = +0.51 PTBB.
- Premium Hands: 90.8% of the time they fold preflop, 36% of the time they fold on the flop.
EV = 0.908*(+0.75) + (0.092*0.36)*(+2.75) + (0.092*0.64)*(-5.5) = +0.45 PTBB.
Skipping ahead to the loosest players:
- Good Hands: 67.4% of the time they fold preflop, 51% of the time they fold on the flop.
EV = 0.674*(+0.75) + (0.326*0.51)*(+2.75) + (0.326*0.49)*(-5.5) = +0.08 PTBB.
- Above Average Hands: 29.5% of the time they fold preflop, 59.9% of the time they fold on the flop.
EV = 0.295*(+0.75) + (0.705*0.599)*(+2.75) + (0.705*0.401)*(-5.5) = -0.17 PTBB.
Once again, this demonstrates a bizarre truism: the less likely your opponent is to fold, the less profitable your blind-stealing will prove to be in terms of folding equity. Note well two points, however: first, this assumes that our opponent is calling EVERY time he has a hand that is at least as strong as a pair of deuces; thus, the opponent holding 22 on a board of AKQ is assumed to call our continuation bet. Also, our EV calculations have thus far assumed that whenever we have not won with the flop bet, we lose every time. This should prove FAR from true, especially against the loosest of our opponents. A safe bet is that we will win at LEAST 1/3 of the time when our flop bet is called, and that safely makes all of these calculations +EV.
After the flop, easy and simple rules must be thrown out the window. From here on in, there is too much “art” in the play to be easily categorized in a summary like this. I do want to point out a few simple points that might make help you in your blind-stealing adventures:
1. Much like bears in the woods, your opponents are more afraid of you than you are of them. This is your hand – you’ve raised preflop and bet the flop. You’re SCARY, here. Given that your opponent has exhibited NO aggression at this point, your folding equity remains solid. Use that ruthlessly. If a scare card hits on the turn and your opponent checks to you again, fire that second (third?) barrel! Don’t be afraid to bet the turn ace, the turn king, the turn pair, the turn flush card, the turn straight card, or the turn blank if you think your opponent is running scared. This is another place where knowing your enemy helps.
2. If your opponent gets aggressive, TRUST him. There is no shame in folding your blind steal attempt. If the flop comes A83r and your opponent bets the pot, or check-raises big, feel free to fold your KQo. In fact, feel OBLIGATED to do so. Blind stealing is decidedly a “small pot game” strategy; if you are risking your stack on a blind steal, you’ve screwed up big-time. Similarly, if you are stealing with total garbage (86s or some such) and someone reraises, GET OUT. Fold immediately, and without hesitation. Don’t bother seeing what the flop brings – there’s no profit in it.
3. Take free cards if they are beneficial to you. One strength of this strategy is that you’ll often have good draws on the flop, and your opponent will usually offer you a free card on the turn. If you’ve got a good draw, feel free to take it. Don’t ALWAYS take it, though – I’ve often fired another barrel with a hand like Tc9c when the board looked like QcJd4s4c. Not only did that turn card 4c improve my hand by giving me nine more outs, but it also scared the doody out of my opponent, making him think that I just turned trips. Why not take advantage of the fear? Instead of playing for my 2-to-1 draw, I can bet immediately and win the pot a significant chunk of the time, and STILL win 1/3 of the time at showdown (usually for even more money, since my opponent won’t see my straight or flush coming).
4. Don’t get discouraged if your steals fail. We’re often worried that because our opponent played back at us the last time we tried to steal, we need to tighten up considerably. Don’t. Our opponents don’t adjust NEARLY as much as we think they do. Just because you got reraised preflop the last time you tried to steal doesn’t mean that they’ve got your number; more likely, SB had AA when he fought back. Now he’s got 92o, and he does NOT have a pair of balls. Hit him again, and keep hitting him.
5. Know your image! While players don’t adjust very well or very far or very effectively, they DO adjust. If you’ve picked up the pot with preflop bets and flop bets the last four hands in a row, fold your 98s in the CO this time. You are not a slave to your cards; understand your table image, understand that your opponents are getting pissed off at you, and understand that your folding equity falls every additional time you win a pot without showing your cards. After you’ve folded preflop three or four times in a row, you can go back to stealing and bullying, but give your opponents a tiny chance to catch their breaths between steals.
6. DO NOT SLOWPLAY. I cannot emphasize this enough. Your entire strategy here is a bluff that depends entirely on your playing your monsters and your junk identically. There’s always the temptation when you have AA preflop and catch A55 on the flop to suddenly change gears. Don’t! With any luck, your opponent won’t believe you, and will call all-in with QQ unimproved. Not only will you stack him, but you’ll also get even more respect the next time you play fast on a board of A55…only this time you’ll have 98s….Fast play of big hands is CRUCIAL to the success of this strategy. Not only does it boost the shania of all your weak junk by elevating your folding equity, but it also gets paid off much more frequently than it would if you were only nut-peddling.
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