Poker Playing Strategy: Defending Your Blinds in Short Table Poker

Short Tables
July 17 2008

When you’re playing short table poker, you can be sure that players will be trying to steal blinds almost every hand. It’s so common that you can plan a counter strategy to take advantage of players who do this too often. Losing your blinds to an aggressive player too often can turn a winning session into a losing one, so you must do something to counteract this common tactic.

If you notice that the same player is raising it up every time you’re on the big blind, you have to fight back. Once a player notices that you’ll surrender your blind, they will try and steal it every time until you do something about it. Even if you’re not getting good cards, you have to reraise this player every now and then. You’ll be able to get them off the hand once the flop comes, unless they hit it, of course. It’s a bit risky because you don’t know what they have, but it’s better than handing over your blind every time it comes around to you. If you do go down, you’ll at least go down fighting.

When you get good cards in the blind positions and opponents raise you up, you can sometimes just call instead of reraising. This throws that player off of your hand, and you can wait until they bet at the flop to reraise. You’ll pick up a little more, which will make up for lots of surrendered blinds you may have to let go.

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