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5.1 Blind Stealing
Blind stealing is a strategy used by a player in late position to steal the money in the blinds. This is done by making a raise to put pressure on the blinds to fold. To use this strategy everyone else must have folded their hands before you.
The theory behind this move is that as the blinds are forced to put chips into the pot via the big and small blind, the likelihood is that they are holding weak cards that they don’t really want to play is high, and hence they would not be prepared to commit any more chips to the pot.
The strength of your hand doesn’t matter too much, but a half decent hand is a benefit for this move, just incase you get called.
Blind stealing can be risky, but is important when you start to play on the higher stakes tables, and in tournament play. It works best against Tight players who are more likely to fold against your bet. Against a loose player you should limit the use of this strategy to when you have a strong hand.
5.2 Know When a Player is Pot Committed
Always be aware of your opponents chip stacks and whether they have become pot committed. When we say a player is pot committed we mean that he has already committed a significant portion of his stack into the pot, and that he is unlikely to fold now, because he would be left with too low a stack.
Usually if a short stacked player has ½ his chips committed before the flop then he is pot committed. The chances are he’ll either raise all-in before the flop if given the chance or use it to chase the pot after the flop whether he has hit his cards or not.
Almost never try to bluff in this situation, as it will be very hard to chase them out of the pot, there’s no point in bluffing if your opponent is not going to fold.
However this also provides an opportunity, by knowing that our opponent is pot committed, we know that there is a good chance that he is betting with a weaker hand than normal, so it allows us to relax our hand requirement a little to call with a more marginal hand.
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