Blind defence V stealing in position in cash games

Gholimoli

Just wondering how defending your blind works and should you be too concerned with it or be willing to let it go rather easy and focus on stealing blinds in position.
How much of this depend on the table?
For example on a loose table should I open my range for blind defence or blind steal?

ianmc38

Don't bother defending your blinds.

You should certainly play and raise alot more hands from the cutoff and button and tighten up your range from UTG + UTG+1. KQs from UTG is a marginal hand to play, let alone K6s.

Your VPIP from the CO and button in Pokertracker should be much higher than your VPIP from UTG and UTG+1.

HJ gave some good cash game advice for Ocallagh in a recent enough post. You should read that. Some basic but important things in it.

For example open-limping = leak.

Bozzer

This is a bit long(winded). Most of it's basic,hope it helps.
Blind defense depends a lot on the opponent your defending against. I don’t really think about terms like ‘defending my blinds’, but rather look for exploitable tendencies in my opponents.
Some TAG opponents just love open-raising on the button but only call re-raises with pocket pairs and AK. These guys are obviously easily exploitable. Just tripling their open-raise should show an immediate profit as they only need to fold > 75% of time to your re-raise. Hopefully you can see that your cards aren’t so important here – you can basically do this initially with any two and subsequently tighten up to Ax, suited connectors, small pp’s which you’d usually fold(assuming 100bb’s). These guys are doing you a favour with their over frequent raises. Don’t overdo it though.

Against more LAGGy opponents you’re better off folding most of your hands or flat calling with stuff like AQ,AJ,KQ looking to flop a hand and have him do the betting. You’re not looking to bloat the pot out of position vs these guys.

Against good players who have a fairly wide raising range from late position then you should probably employ a mixed strategy when oop. Some people favour calling preflop with a slightly broader range than usual and bluff leading/check-raising the flop with a frequency which is difficult for good player to exploit. Your trying your best to neutralise his positional advantage but it’s pretty tough against good opposition.
Other people prefer folding or re-rasing preflop. I’ll give an example to show how this can be effective. Say you and good player have $800 in a 3/6 game. He open raises to $21 on button, sb calls, and you squeeze with xx, making it 90 to go. Most of the time the squeeze will work on it’s own but say only good player calls, pot is $200, if you lead for close to pot on the flop then you are basically threatening your opponent’s stack of $700 and forcing him to make a commitment decision. The leverage of your flop bet makes it difficult for opponent to continue without a monster. Something like this should be done rarely and provided you have the right image.
Ideally you don’t want to play out of position against good players but when you do you should try mixing it up and see what works well for you/in the games you play.
In all of these situations you should think about your opponent’s image of you(if you think he has one).

Gholimoli

Bozzer wrote:

This is a bit long(winded). Most of it's basic,hope it helps.
Blind defense depends a lot on the opponent your defending against. I don’t really think about terms like ‘defending my blinds’, but rather look for exploitable tendencies in my opponents.
Some TAG opponents just love open-raising on the button but only call re-raises with pocket pairs and AK. These guys are obviously easily exploitable. Just tripling their open-raise should show an immediate profit as they only need to fold > 75% of time to your re-raise. Hopefully you can see that your cards aren’t so important here – you can basically do this initially with any two and subsequently tighten up to Ax, suited connectors, small pp’s which you’d usually fold(assuming 100bb’s). These guys are doing you a favour with their over frequent raises. Don’t overdo it though.

Against more LAGGy opponents you’re better off folding most of your hands or flat calling with stuff like AQ,AJ,KQ looking to flop a hand and have him do the betting. You’re not looking to bloat the pot out of position vs these guys.

Against good players who have a fairly wide raising range from late position then you should probably employ a mixed strategy when oop. Some people favour calling preflop with a slightly broader range than usual and bluff leading/check-raising the flop with a frequency which is difficult for good player to exploit. Your trying your best to neutralise his positional advantage but it’s pretty tough against good opposition.
Other people prefer folding or re-rasing preflop. I’ll give an example to show how this can be effective. Say you and good player have $800 in a 3/6 game. He open raises to $21 on button, sb calls, and you squeeze with xx, making it 90 to go. Most of the time the squeeze will work on it’s own but say only good player calls, pot is $200, if you lead for close to pot on the flop then you are basically threatening your opponent’s stack of $700 and forcing him to make a commitment decision. The leverage of your flop bet makes it difficult for opponent to continue without a monster. Something like this should be done rarely and provided you have the right image.
Ideally you don’t want to play out of position against good players but when you do you should try mixing it up and see what works well for you/in the games you play.
In all of these situations you should think about your opponent’s image of you(if you think he has one).

excellent stuff bozz as usual .thanks

willis

nice post bozzer. I definitely agree with the difference you emphasise between playing your blinds against LAG and TAG opponents. I would consider myself TAG and i hate getting reraised by the blinds as you often assume(correctly for 95% of players at 1/2 anyway) that they have big hands. So if i spot a TAG whose aggresive in position I like to mix it up now and again by reraising from the blinds, however against LAG players its dangerous to do as they will call more often than not and you may find yourself involved in a big pot on the turn OOP with no hand.