Blind Stealing in Cash Games

Not as much play this week, for various reasons.  Managed to win the HPC Monday Online SnG which was nice, as I’ve been knocked out pretty early the previous few weeks.  Since then though I’ve probably only got about 500 hands of online cash games this week.  This has been partially lack of opportunity but more part of my new deliberate schedule of playing less and studying more.

I’m currently focusing on blind stealing in cash games.  There’s some excellent material written by good players in the 2+2 archives – actually as a comment I find those archives FAR more useful than than the HH discussion threads. Analysis of my Pokertracker database suggests I’ve got a pretty good record with blind steals, however I think I can tighten up this strategy and make it even more profitable.  Especially at the lower limits it can be easy to ignore this strategy – people feel that donks will call with anything and suffer the inevitable beats, or have to toss the hand away when they dont hit.  To some extent that may be true, but the true value of blind stealing comes in when (a) you practice good table selection, and (b) you practice good seat selection on that table.  You need to be targeting the right sort of villian – the tight ones who dont defend much.  I think most people know that playing a wider range in position is correct, but don’t get full value out of stealing becuase they don’t consider the villian they are raising into, or how he/she will play the texture of the board that flops.

So thats been my focus this week, I’ve been dedicating some sessions I would normally play to studying.  I’ve read a lot of theory on the topic now, next week’s focus is going to be analysing my database against some of the concepts and seeing how I’ve been applying it unconsciously in the past – I’m betting I can pick up some areas where I can improve my performance in this area. Even adding 0.5ptbb/100 to your winrate by focusing on these sort of issues can add up to good profits in the long run.