There is a popular trend developing in the poker world. People are starting to realize they should defend more often against small raises with a wider range of hands.
Included in this set are three poker buttons. You get a real Casino Sized 2 inch Diameter Dealer Button. Also included is the following 1 1/4 inch diameter game buttons: Big Blind and Little Blind Button.
I've been told that I fold too much, so finally I've started calling and three-betting with a wider range from the blinds and the button when facing frequent opens from aggressive players.
Being a tight-passive, small stakes player, I wasn't easily convinced to get outside of my comfort zone, but I'm glad I did. In this series, I will share with you some of my 'a-ha!' moments while making this transition in hopes that you, too, will begin to widen your defending ranges appropriately.
How Often Should We Defend the Big Blind?
Let's say I am in the big blind facing a steal attempt from the cutoff. It's a nine-handed multi-table tournament with antes that are 10 percent the size of the big blind.
If villain makes it 2.2x the big blind to go, the bet needs to work as a complete bluff only 47 percent of the time in order to break even. This means that the players left to act must collectively defend 53 percent of the time to prevent him from making money with any two cards.
This number doesn't even take into account that the raiser has some postflop equity when called. Since players in the small stakes games I play do not defend nearly often enough in spots like this late in an MTT, aggressive regulars profit by raising with very wide ranges.
What Sort of Hands Should We Defend?
In the past when I was one of those players left to act, I'd think to myself 'I know this clown doesn't have anything.' I couldn't wait until I finally got a hand with which to catch him. The problem is that those top hands never seem to come often enough.
Nowadays, I know that if he doesn't have anything the vast majority of the time, then I don't need much of a hand to play back at him. The opener's range in this spot is often so wide that it creates an opportunity for me to profit with a wide range as well. I can either call and take the great price I am being offered, or I can three-bet to try and resteal his steal attempt.
In our example, I am facing a 2.2x open in the big blind. It costs me 1.2 BB to see a flop in a 5.9 BB pot. That means I only need to win this pot around 20 percent of the time to break even.
It's true that this is hard to do from out of position with a bad hand, but consider that even a hand as raggy as flops two pair-plus or a combo draw almost 10 percent of the time. If I also continue with any naked flush draw, that gets me up to 17 percent of the time. If I am at all capable of donk betting or check-raise bluffing with backdoor draws or winning with weak one-pair hands, then I can easily continue at least another 3 percent of the time to make this call break even at worst.
Postflop play is beyond the scope of this article, but taking aggressive lines such as these helps me to avoid the 'fit or fold' mentality and win more often which, in turn, encourages me to defend more often. That said, I try not to go crazy with this, so I stick with hands like suited three-gappers or better that have the potential to flop combo draws I can barrel.
How Often Do We Need to Win?
I used to hate calling out of position with the trashiest of these hands. I felt like I was throwing good money after bad until I started playing my backdoor draws aggressively postflop and winning more than my fair share of hands.
If you're a small stakes player like me, then maybe you too failed to realize that losing even as much as 75 percent of the time means that we win 25 percent of the time — which is profitable when we only need to win 20 percent of the time to break even. This bit of math was eye-opening for me.
We Can Also Defend By Three-Betting
Sometimes instead of just calling, I will occasionally want to defend against loose opens by three-betting for value with hands like ace-king or QQ+. In order to be somewhat balanced, I will three-bet bluff occasionally as well. The fact that I get to use the big blind as a part of my three-bet means I am getting a healthy discount on this play.
Let's say I want to 3x villain's 2.2x open as a bluff. On the surface, it seems that this bet should cost me 6.6 big blinds. In actuality, it only costs me 5.6 BBs because I have already put my big blind into the pot. This 3x three-bet bluff only needs to work a little more than 54 percent of the time to break even. The hunter has now become the hunted. If I only try this against villains who fold more than 46 percent of their raising range, this bet is profitable with any two cards.
Generally, I will do this with hands just below my flatting range. Since I call in the big blind with most of the hands that can flop good straight and/or flush draws, my three-bet bluffing range will consist of hands that are just a little too weak to flat like or hands with blocker value like .
Again, I will only go this wide if I think villain will fold to the three-bet often. If I expect some flats, then I will three-bet bluff with hands that flop better than these.
Conclusion
Printable Poker Blinds
The math in this article shows that it is pretty hard to go wrong defending the big blind against small steal attempts with a wide range of hands. For the most part, we should be flatting most hands that flop somewhat decently and ocassionally three-betting both for value and as a bluff.
Things get a little bit trickier when we are in the small blind. We'll continue this discussion by considering how to approach that position next week.
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For as long as hold'em has been a thing — some 50-odd years years, at least — it has featured the same basic structure. Two or more players posted designated “blinds” to begin the betting. In games or tournaments featuring antes, everyone put in a designated ante as well.
But what if there were a more efficient way to go about building the starting pot?
That's a question some have asked themselves, and after all that time, things may finally be changing on a fundamental level. Some tournaments and cash games have introduced the concept of consolidated antes. Instead of everyone anteing into the pot, a player in a designated position — typically either the big blind or the button — antes for the whole table.
The Problem
Anyone who has ever played a low-stakes poker tournament and made it to the antes knows how frustrating it can be to have inattentive players repeatedly slow the pace of play by failing to get their antes into the pot in a timely fashion.
Take a typical nightly with 15-minute or 20-minute levels. A combination of inexperienced dealers and players daydreaming or hammering away at their phones in between hands can make it so a “level” is really just four or five hands.
The logistics of collecting an ante from every single player on every single hand takes time.
Even with things motoring along at a fast pace, there's no getting around the fact that the logistics of collecting an ante from every single player on every single hand takes time.
Furthermore, the size of an ante presents another logistical problem. Namely, the ante is typically some fraction of a small blind, meaning it's composed of one or more of the smallest chips in play. Often, these chips are completely irrelevant to the pot-to-pot betting and actual gameplay. The only purpose of the chips is for antes.
Knowing this, tournament staff often give late-registering players a stack of large-denomination chips. Even players registered from the start usually only get a handful of the early-round ante chips. What follows is a tedious, sometimes slow process of making change seemingly every other hand so players can ante.
The Solution?
Consolidated antes attempt to solve these problems. Speed the game up, the thinking goes, by crunching the time and chips devoted to the antes into one player per hand rather than making each player at the table devote some time and attention to the process.
Everything else is the same, except anteing is easier and faster and everyone can play more hands.
Campbell: 'The high rollers have really embraced it as a superior format for their events.'
Many in the industry credit ARIA as being the first poker room to implement the consolidated antes, starting with their high roller series. A player who had participated in a cash game using them recommended the format to ARIA Poker Tournament Director Paul Campbell, and he said he was willing to give it a trial run.
Campbell instituted the consolidated antes — though he moved them from the button to the big blind — in April 2017.
“The high roller players are very forward-thinking individuals, so despite being initially skeptical, they went into it with an open mind and were very instrumental in any adjustments,” Campbell said. “Conceptually, I liked it immediately and didn't have any tournament integrity issues with it. The high rollers have really embraced it as a superior format for their events.”
Word of the format spread. More of the industry's top tournament directors have started wondering if consolidated antes are the way of the future.
In response to player feedback and “testing best procedure,” the World Series of Poker has introduced a big blind ante to the Circuit, which is scheduled to appear for the first time at WSOP Circuit Rio Las Vegas in the $2,200 High Roller. Its value will always be equal to the value of the big blind, according to WSOP Tournament Director Jack Effel.
Days after speaking with PokerNews, WSOP officials announced big blind antes would be in use at all high roller events during the WSOP this summer.
Matt Savage, founder of the Tournament Directors Association and current executive tour director of the World Poker Tour, introduced an event with big blind antes in the L.A. Poker Classic preliminary events. It also happened to be the opening reentry event that drew nearly 4,000 entries, making it perhaps the largest-scale study yet in the consolidated ante experiment.
/Texas_Holdem_Poker_Table_with_Blinds.svg-59e2c56d845b3400111dfb4e.png "Big Blind Online Poker Tables")
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Savage, who has been staunchly arguing in favor of the format through his Twitter account in recent months, said afterward that it ran perfectly smoothly. He said nearly all of the feedback he got, mostly from recreational players, was positive.
Consolidated antes appear to be proliferating and performing well. Perhaps this is indeed the direction the industry is heading. All that's left is to call a meeting of the TDA, rewrite the rules, and make poker great again.
Easy game, right?
When a Solution Creates More Problems
Easy game in theory, sure. Except, actually put the consolidated antes into practice, and cracks start to appear in the shiny new monolith of poker efficiency.
Savage said nearly all of the feedback he got, mostly from recreational players, was positive.
First, there's debate about which position should post the antes. In the cash games that prompted the ARIA reg to suggest the consolidated antes to Campbell, the button posted an ante. While that appears to be the format favored by a larger number of players — just eight percent voted in favor of a big blind ante in a recent PokerNews poll — tournament directors seem to favor a big blind ante.
The most likely reason for this is that every hand dealt has a big blind, while not every hand dealt has a player on the button. No matter how many players bust out in a hand, someone will post a big blind, while situations exist that result in a dead button. Who posts the ante then?
Effel said that was the WSOP's reasoning for choosing a big blind ante, and it appears to be the industry standard in consolidated ante formats at this point.
Then, there are the thornier logistical issues that come with short stacks, which seem to be the biggest drawback to consolidated antes.
Consider a player with 15,000 in chips playing 5,000/10,000 with a 10,000 consolidated ante. The player has the big blind next hand. Which does he or she pay first, the ante or the big blind?
The bigger issue, stemming from that, is how many chips a player can win when he or she is short and posting less than the full value of the big blind plus the ante.
Different tournaments appear to be tackling this in different ways. The way poker has always operated, of course, would seem to indicate the ante should go in first. That's the way Savage and the LAPC staff operated their event, and that's the way Campbell and the ARIA staff did things at first.
Player requests prompted a switch to posting the big blind first. As pointed out in what became a heated Twitter debate between a number of industry heads, this could lead to a situation wherein a player only breaks even despite winning an all-in hand.
For example, a player has only 5,000 in the same situation as the one posted above. If he or she wins the pot, he or she would only win back that same 5,000 from the ante, not having posted any blinds to become eligible to win anything that anyone else put in the pot.
@stevebadger100 @TheJustinHammer @DanSmithHolla @SavagePoker What you are suggesting is that when a player can’t pa… https://t.co/ahGTvuGsx7
— Daniel Negreanu (@RealKidPoker)Daniel Negreanuadamantly argued that this is absurd, and it's one of the reasons the ARIA crowd pushed for a switch to big blind posted before antes.
“Theoretically, I actually prefer ante first as it's more mathematically and logically 'correct,'” Campbell said. “The high rollers wanted this change, so we accommodated. These are the types of players who understand the ramifications and in my opinion believe that in practice, it's better, even if slightly flawed.
“I am going to leave the format as is for now at ARIA but open-mindedly discuss this matter with Matt Savage and [Commerce TD] Justin Hammer,” two of the best tournament poker minds in the industry.”
The WSOP will be following ARIA's big blind first procedure.
Kessler pointed out this could lead to massive stalling at tables next to break.
No matter which order they go in, there's no debate that a consolidated ante drastically changes strategy for players sitting on short stacks. If the big blind is approaching, these players must radically alter shoving ranges to account for the massive amount of chips they'll have to put in on the big blind.
Then, there are short-handed tables. Should a table with four players be posting a full table's worth of antes on every big blind?
Structure guru Allen Kessler called that idea “ridiculous.”
“I made a proposal to stop the big blind ante at the first redraw,” he said. “That would alleviate a lot of the short-handed issues.”
At their Punta Cana event, partypoker implemented a system wherein the consolidated ante amount was halved if at least three seats were empty. Others have suggested systems where the amount progressively lessened based on fewer players being present at the table, which would help short-handed strategy remain more consistent.
Finally, there's more incentive than ever to avoid the big blind position. Kessler pointed out this could lead to massive stalling at tables next to break or for players who are moving and spy an empty seat in early position at the table to which they've been assigned.
The Way of the Future?
Add it all up, and it's hard to say with certainty that consolidated antes represent a step forward for poker.
There are myriad issues, and plenty of parties maintain there's just no real improvement when all of the pros and cons are weighed against each other.
Kessler: 'If you have competent dealers, you're not really saving much time.'
Overall, Kessler said he isn't a fan of the system. It's confusing and scary to new players, he argued, particularly with regard to the all-in situations.
“There are too many issues,” he said. “There's nothing wrong with the current system. It's totally fair. If you have competent dealers, you're not really saving much time.”
Poker pro Bryan Devonshire leans the same way. His primary concerns revolve around the stated strategical screwball thrown to short stacks by the monstrous commitment to the pot from the big blind.
“I would be a fan of them early in tournaments, but not when posting all antes is ICM smashing to many stacks,” he said.
@AllenKessler @Kevmath @WSOP @WSOPTD @RioVegas @RioPokerRoom @partypokerlive I don’t like adjusting the ante based… https://t.co/GDRvgOi4mF
— Paul Campbell (@TDPaulCampbell)Campbell remains a believer.
The high rollers who pioneered the format in the events he supervises prefer it, and it made enough of an impression on Campbell that he introduced it into ARIA's weekend $240 dailies. He said stalling hasn't been a problem “in the slightest” in any of the ARIA events regardless of buy-in.
“The response has been very favorable,” he said. “The vast majority of our regular players want me to make this the format in all ARIA events. It definitely has enough merits to introduce to the recreational players and large fields.”
Campbell: 'It definitely has enough merits to introduce to the recreational players and large fields.'
The industry, Campbell believes, will arrive at an optimal set of rules in due time from continued trial and error.
He wouldn't definitely say that consolidated antes would become an industry standard, but he appears fully behind the format and he isn't the only one. From ARIA to LAPC to 888 to PokerStars and partypoker events to the Circuit, the format has slowly gained traction even if it hasn't become standardized.
In a few short months, it will get its debut on the biggest stage yet, with the entire poker world playing or watching at the WSOP. Is this a trial run that could see consolidated antes become the norm in all WSOP events, depending on the success or failure this summer?
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“Too early to tell,” Effel said. “Let's see how it goes.”
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