Reraising From the Blinds Preflop

editors note: this article appeared in CardPlayer magazine in February 2008

I am a multitable tournament professional and provide exclusive coaching videos for CardPlayer Pro, powered by PokerSavvy Plus. My columns will center on hands taken from my videos. As a Card Player reader, you’ll have access to clips of these hands and many others. My columns will provide in-depth analysis of interesting tournament scenarios. In addition to the columns, you can watch videos on CardPlayer.com for a richer learning experience.

In this column, I will touch on an important issue that I believe a lot of tournament players approach incorrectly: reraising from the blinds preflop when a player has already opened.

When you reraise preflop while in position (any position preflop other than the blinds), you have four things going for you: You have taken the lead in the hand, you can induce a fold, you further define your opponents' range, and you are in position post-flop. Due to these four advantages that you gain by being aggressive, your opponents are left with very little reason to continue without a premium hand. This, in a nutshell, is why tournament poker success is almost entirely predicated on selective aggression. However, this formula gets complicated when reraising a pot from one of the blinds behind someone’s action. When reraising from the blinds preflop, you lose the most important of the four advantages gained from raising — having position post-flop.

In this hand, I was in the small blind and facing a raise from the player who was under the gun plus one while holding A-K. A-K, like most unpaired and unsuited hands, gains most of its strength from seeing all five cards. Essentially what you want to do with all reraising hands here (not just A-K) is to either take down the pot preflop to avoid playing out of position or define your opponent’s hand range enough so that you can play profitably post-flop. By flat-calling in a situation like this, I would not help define the villain’s range at all. Furthermore, by raising to only three times his raise, I would not fold out enough hands that will call and play in position post-flop.

When the action got to me, the pot was 880 with 100 already committed to the pot from my small blind. A simple three-times raise of his 580 opening bet would give my opponent a good reason to call. He would be getting more than 2-1 pot odds with position post-flop — good enough for a very wide opening range to continue in the hand and do so profitably. Therefore, the quite simple solution to combat this problem is to raise more aggressively from the blinds.

In general, you will need to leave your opponents with less than 2-1 odds preflop to make their actions unprofitable in the long run. So, I raised to 1,970, leaving my opponent with the unpleasant option of calling my bet with slightly worse than 2-1 odds. The other main advantage of raising slightly larger from the blinds is that it narrows your opponent’s range considerably (in all but the very deep-stacked tournaments). This enabled you to gain back some of the edge you lose by playing out of position postflop.

In this example, my opponent flatcalled my reraise. At this point, I could quite confidently say that my opponent’s range was J-J or better and A-K. By narrowing my opponent’s range to those hands, it enabled me to play the hand accordingly and minimize the potential losses I faced. Raising larger amounts when in the blinds is an important lesson to learn while playing all forms of poker. If you are playing with sufficiently deep stacks, making normal raises can be a death sentence against good players, who will constantly take their odds and position and play profitable poker against you. ♠