No one, and I mean no one, hates the small blind more than my friend and world renowned poker author Tommy Angelo. He’s written tons on the subject. My favorite article of his on it is called How To Play The Small Blind. I recommend you read it, but if you haven’t, here are the Cliff’s Notes: “Don’t.”
Just kidding. That’s not really a summary of his article. It’s the article in its entirety. This time, I’m not kidding. Of course, he’s written other words about the small blind including, “The small blind is where money goes to die” and, "From the small blind, I am charged a fee for something I wouldn't want for free." While I understand where Tommy is coming from, I’d like to add a little more nuance to the subject.
Tommy plays $5-$10 live cash games. In his non-ante games, the preflop pot is always a negligible percentage of his stack. I play small stakes online tournaments. At some point in the later levels, the preflop pot with antes becomes a significant percentage of my stack.
More importantly, his tough cash games often have good aggressive players who will punish him for playing too many hands from the small blind. My soft games are often full of bad passive players who not only fail to punish me for this, but make so many mistakes postflop that it would be almost criminal to pass on a reasonable opportunity to play with them.
Their mistakes are so bad that I actually have an all-in adjusted winrate of just under +5 bb/100 over 15K hands played from the small blind where -15 bb/100 is considered pretty profitable. Remember, if you fold every hand dealt to you in the small blind, your winrate would be -50 bb/100 from that position, so anything greater than that is profitable. I was able to achieve this insane small blind winrate, not by folding it like Tommy has to in his tough cash games, but by using it to exploit the opponents in my soft tournaments. Here’s how I’ve been able to do it.
Exploiting the Big Blind
Let’s say the effective stack is 20bbs, there are about 2.5bbs in the pot from blinds and antes, and the action folds around to me in the small blind. Like everything in small stakes tournaments, my play here is guided by the reads I have on my opponent or the tendencies of the player pool. The decision I make in this situation depends on if I am up against a tight player, a passive player, or an aggressive player. If I don't know the player, I assume he is passive until further notice because most of my opponents are.
If the BB is a tight player, then I raise super small with 100% of hands. I choose a sizing just above a min raise because this is all that’s needed to make him fold a decent portion of his range. If I raise to 2.1bbs, I only need this bet to work more than 39% (1.6 divided by 4.1) of the time to be profitable with any two cards. Remember, the 0.5bb from my small blind is already in the pot, so in order to make a 2.1bb raise, I only need to invest another 1.6bbs. The small blind may seem like small potatoes, but in this case, it gives me about a 24% discount on the size of my steal which needs to work 39% of the time to break even, but works more like 50-60% of the time against tight BB defenders.
If the BB is a passive player, then I split my range in a manner that best exploits his tendency to call with too many hands. I make a big 4bb raise with my big hands, a medium 3bb raise with my medium hands, and just call with the rest of the deck. I don’t expect a passive player to fold very often, so I want to get in as many chips as I can based on my hand strength. When I have a weak hand, his calling mistake inadvertently becomes correct, so I just complete knowing he is unlikely to raise me as a bluff due to his passivity.
Postflop, I continue playing in this face-up manner with no worries of being exploited. I c-bet big with my big hands, medium with my medium hands, and small with my small hands. I do tweak my postflop strategy a bit depending on whether the opponent is tight or passive.
I’ll start out with small bets regardless of my hand strength against a tight player. If I want a fold, a small bet is all I need to accomplish this against his weakest hands. If I want a call, a small bet keeps him in the pot with his medium strength hands. If I want him to keep calling, I’ll gradually ratchet up the size of my bet relative to the size of the pot without fear of “losing my customer” because his range gets stronger with each subsequent bet he calls. I occasionally try and bluff tight players beyond the flop, but not very often.
Against a passive player, my exploits are even more pronounced. If I want a fold, I make a ridiculously small bet because he’s only going to fold the stone bottom of his range anyway. If I want a call, I make a medium bet on dry boards and a big bet on wet boards. As with the tight player, I only try and bluff passive players beyond the flop when the spot is very good.
An aggressive player is actually the easiest to exploit in this scenario because often all the action happens preflop. If I have a hand I want to get all-in with, I raise and call when she shoves. If I want her to fold, I open shove with some hands or complete and shove over her raise with other hands. I don't mind giving her a walk with my weakest hands because she's earned it with her aggression.
If she just calls my raise or checks back when I complete, I reverse the postflop betting strategy from above. I c-bet small with my big hands, medium with my medium hands, and big with my small hands. If I get raised when I have a good bluff catcher, I just call her down. Blind vs. blind ranges are very wide, so it’s important to give an aggressive player room to bluff it off in this scenario.
Exploiting Limpers
If you play in small stakes games like I do, you know that often the action does not fold around to the small blind. These games are full of players who love to open limp with all sorts of hands. Usually, these players are passive postflop as well, but it is not uncommon to see a maniac limp in with the intention of playing aggressively postflop either.
The beauty of playing with passive players is that they go to showdown a lot which allows you to see their hands and reverse engineer their strategy. Once you know which type of hands they like to limp in with and how they like to play them, they are easy to beat, as long as there are not too many of them.
If only one or two players limp and it folds around to me in the small blind, I will complete with a wide range of hands. When stacks are deep, I stick to hands that have a reasonable chance of hitting the flop hard. As the effective stack becomes shallower, I complete even wider if I have the limpers covered because my hand matters less often when I can threaten stacks and force more folds.
I can do this profitably with a wide range once I’ve seen several showdowns from these limpers because this tells me which flops I can bluff them on. If they like to limp with small cards, I can lead on boards that contain big cards, and vice versa, regardless of my hand. I'm looking for spots where they are likely to have completely missed the flop, so a small size is all that is needed to get them to fold. If they don’t fold and I happen to have a hand with some equity, the small size also allows me to draw to a value hand cheaply and bomb it if I get there. If the limper is a maniac, I adjust my strategy the same way I did against the aggressive player in the big blind from the previous section.
Exploiting Loose Openers
I exploit loose openers by squeezing or check-raising lite. I won’t go into the details here because it’s essentially the same strategy I outlined in my March Two Plus Two Magazine article called Increase Your Big Blind Aggression.
I will say that playing aggressively with a wide range from the small blind is only possible in games like mine where the big blind is likely to be too passive to punish you preflop by squeezing your frequent flat calls or four-betting your frequent three-bets. In fact, if he is tight, then these plays work even better from the small blind because he will fold too often and allow the dead money from his big blind to subsidize these plays.
Therein lies the key difference between how I see the small blind in soft tournaments and how Tommy Angelo sees it in tough cash games. To me, it’s stopping to pick up dropped dollars in the presence of sheep. To him, it’s stopping to pick up dropped pennies in the presence of wolves.
