Stealing Blinds

By Reginald Vel Johnson

How to use your table image to your advantage to best steal blinds.

Stealing blinds is one of the most often used moves in Hold’em. Basically, stealing the blinds involves raising with a marginal hand when everyone else is checking in an attempt to take the blinds. But what’s really great is that you can actually trick these people by re-stealing the blinds.

To pull off this great move, you re-raise the initial raiser in an attempt to get them to fold. Of course, you need to have a strong feeling that your opponent is merely trying to steal the blinds before you do so. And this knowledge will come from your previous observations of the player in question.

In addition to knowing that the person who’s trying to steal is overly-aggressive, you yourself need to keep a low profile in order to steal the blinds. The reason being is that the initial stealer may call your bluff when you attempt to re-steal if you are playing reckless in previous hands. If you think your table image is a tight player then stealing the blinds will likely be a lot easier task but can not be used to often as players will realize what you are doing and call your bluff.

This goes back to controlling hands in poker and dominating while you are in position. With these skills, you can re-steal blinds after someone attempts to do it to you.