Building a No-Limit Hold’em Starting Hand Chart – The Blinds

My starting hands in the blinds have been the same as my starting hands for first position although heads up against the small blind I play the same as I would on the button. The only losses I suffer with a half million hands since the first of the year are the blinds. Of course I would like to minimized my losses with blind play and improve the other positions.

Ed - Is it for me to treat the blinds the same as first posiion?

Does your play in the Blinds change much in a 6 max game?

The percentage of the hands that you play in the blinds is much higher. Is that a consideration?

If the reraise is only 6-8% of your stack (and the stacks of the relevant opponents), you can consider calling with pocket pairs also.

True, but….

Shouldn’t a big consideration (”you can consider…”) be how the first raiser plays? If you deem her likely to four-bet, you may be relatively likely to fold without seeing the flop. I’ve heard it said that a stack size of 13x is about right to get implied odds for a set, obviously dependent on the raiser you’re targeting. Hence it seems that calling a reraise for 8% of your stack without closing the action can only be correct if you’re pretty certain the raiser isn’t going to four-bet. That would most likely be a somewhat smart maniac who open-raises a lot of hands but doesn’t semibluff wildly preflop.

I don’t understand how you can “obvious call 22-88″ vs a button opener with 100bb stacks. You are not going to stack him enough to get the required IO for setmining.

How did you come up with the chart Ed? I mean, how do you know that those hands are profitable from those positions in those situations?

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Ed - Is it for me to treat the blinds the same as first posiion?
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For the most part, I play the same hands in the BB that I would play UTG. I will call a min-raise in the BB with some drawing hands if the pot is shaping up to be a multi-way monster. I don’t know if this is right or wrong, but I do.

To a real raise or a limp, I think it depends how you play. I don’t really open limp for the most part. I open raise something like 22+,AK UTG and UTG+1. Sometimes AQs and KQs as well, depending how frisky I feel. If it were a limped pot, I wouldn’t reopen the betting in the BB with 22-88 or 99. I’d just check it and see a flop. If it were a raised pot, depending on who did the raising, I’d flat call a lot of pairs and occasionally AK. I’d 3-bet with some harder to quantify group of hands that may be wider or narrower than my UTG range depending on the position on the 1st raiser, # of people in the pot, etc, etc. Sort of depends how likely it is you can take the pot down pre-flop and your range estimates of the players that will have position on you.

Hi Ed,

I met you and Elaine in NOLA last year (we ate at Jacques-Imo’s). Love your site and hope you are doing well.

Anyway, the relevant comment to this thread is a question regarding your squeeze raises from the BB. Are you generally making them with semibluff hands like, say, T9s or with complete garbage like 62o? Obviously, it depends on lots of factors like stack sizes, how likely people will call the raise loosely, but what are you generally looking for when you make a squeeze play? On the one hand, T9s will hit more flops which gives you more protection if you do get called; on the other hand, T9s has more value if you just check as you are much more likely to make a big hand that wins a big pot.

Michael,

Both the concepts you mention are straight out of NLHE:TAP, but it’s the question of which to apply. I’m unfamiliar with a squeeze raise, but I would imagine Ed’s referring a squeeze reraise. (I suppose you could use squeeze to refer to raising a bunch of limpers, but that’s not usually how I’ve seen it, and not what I took Ed to be talking about. However, you should semibluff raise a bit with garbage hands, per NLHE:TAP)

In the squeeze reraise case, the concept of just checking to see a flop with your almost-decent hands and raising with your trash doesn’t apply. You obviously can’t check and see a free flop, so you’d rather reraise with the hands that have some value. You hope to take down the pot without a flop, but you might get called, so you may as well semibluff the hands that have a better-than-junk chance of outflopping your opponent’s likely big pair.

Great series again Ed - and so well written that its easily understandable.

I have always had this “fixation” about preflop charts/standards etc and these articles really put some order in the mess.

I always play online 6-handed and I mostly just limp with my decent-but-not-excellent hands in MP, now I try to knock out cutoff&button with a modest raise to get to play in position against blinds, and it seems to work most of the time, especially at the micro stakes I play in.

Ed,

What sort of hands do you complete with when you have several limpers in?

So when will the chart be published????

We can’t wait for the last part and the final chart!

Was the notion of a “starting hand chart” really a gimmick? I for one (and maybe others?) read the articles with interest looking forward to the eventual chart. So, the title of the series got me to read about starting hands, and to think a little about when and how to play pre-flop. Now we have a nice set of articles and some readers thinking more about pre-flop play. Was that the real purpose of these articles? If so, no need for the chart, purpose fulfilled.

But I’d like to see the chart anyway.

Well I’m just going to make my own chart then so there