Tricky thing, defending your blind in no-limit hold ’em.
You’ve already made a full bet if you’re the big blind, half that if you’re the small blind, so you get to watch the action come to you before the flop.
But for the rest of the hand, you have to make one of the first moves, meaning the value of position that benefited you in the first round of betting works against you after that, so your opponents will try to steal your blind with pre-flop raises.
Which is where knowing your opponent helps you defend your blind.
Poker pro Andy Bloch faced that kind of read when he drew pocket 3s in the big blind early in a tournament.
Andy Bloch’s hand
3 of clubs
3 of diamonds
“An aggressive bad player who bluffs too much raised my blind,” Bloch said. “I just called.”
The flop comes 2-4-5, rainbow, giving Bloch an openended straight draw with the treys.
“I figure most likely I’m ahead of him,” said Bloch, a graduate of MIT and Harvard Law School. “I figure he has ace-king, ace-queen, ace-jack. If he has a big pair, I have to get lucky.”
Bloch’s opponent bets only $100 into a $650 pot, an odd underbet when most pros would match the pot.
“Against other players, I might’ve raised there if he bet a normal amount,” Bloch said. “But I didn’t want to raise this player because I was hoping he would continue to bluff. I was going to call him down to the end with a pair of threes.”
The turn came an A, a perfect card for Bloch because it gave him a baby straight while keeping his opponent interested if he had an A. Bloch bet about the pot– $1,500–and was called. The river came a K. Bloch bet $3,000, his opponent called and showed an offsuit A-J loser.
The flop
2 of diamonds
4 of spades
5 of clubs
The turn
Ace of hearts
The river
King of clubs
“On the flop I didn’t raise him, even though I was pretty confident I had the best hand, and the reason was, I thought I could get him to bluff on the turn, or if an ace came and he had an ace-something, then I’d get paid off a lot of money, and that’s what happened,” Bloch said.
“The lesson here is, if you think you have the best hand, sometimes you don’t want to raise because you’ll get paid off more money later on.”
Table talk
Open-ended straight draw: Four consecutive cards to make a straight on the high end or low end.
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srosenbloom@tribune.com
