
Originally Posted by
Thee One
I'
m not saying you shouldn't play your
position. I
button raise often, and almost all the time if it's folded to me. But that's not a
blind steal in my book, that's good positional poker. So maybe the disagreement is semantics.
Open-raising from the cutoff or
button with anything is the definition of
blind stealing. So it is semantics, but yours are wrong

Of course
blind stealing is also a part of good, positional poker.

Originally Posted by
Thee One
But raising $1 to pick up .35c in blinds is hardly worth the time or the effort without a SOLID read.
I think it's definitely worth it, even without a read. I only think it isn't worth it if you have a SOLID read that one of the blinds will defend.
I'
m going to try a little math, using a very simplified scenario... let's say the SB and BB are average,
tight, NL25 players. I think this type of player will
re-raise you with a very small
range of hands, let's say 2% (
QQ+, AK), and
call your
raise OOP with maybe the next 6% of hands. (The numbers could be higher than this, but I think you'll see that it makes little difference, even if we
raise these to 4% and the next 10%, which is very unlikely
IMO, stealing is still +EV.) Let's only think about the times when it's a true
blind steal, and you
don't have very good cards. So you can assume that you're always getting the
worst of it when the SB or BB raises or calls. If you
fold to every
blind re-raise, your
expected value in those hands is -$1 x 0.04 (chance one of the blinds will
re-raise) or -$0.04.
For times that one of the blinds just calls your
raise, I think it's reasonable to assume you can win at least 20% of the hands
post-
flop, given that you've shown pre-
flop aggression and have
position. This is a simplistic analysis, because sometimes you'll c-bet and lose more than your original $1
steal, but I also think that between
hitting the flop and successful c-bets you'll win more than 20% of the hands
post-
flop, so those cancel out somewhat. In any
case, in this simplistic analysis, your EV for hands when one of the blinds calls your
raise is -$1 x 0.12 (chance one of the blinds calls) x 0.80 (chance you
fold post-
flop) + $1 x 0.12 x 0.20 (chance you win
post-
flop) = -$0.072.
Finally, the rest of the hands, you'll win the blinds outright. So EV for these hands is $0.35 x 0.84 (chance both blinds
fold) = +$0.294.
Adding these together ($0.294 - $0.04 - $0.072) give us a +EV of about $0.18 per
blind steal attempt. I know it's only eighteen cents, but that's almost the BB and over a long time, that will add up! Let's say you
steal blinds once in three opportunities from the
button, that means you're stealing 3.33 times per 100 hands, for a +EV of $0.60 per 100 hands. That's over 1BB/100hands!
I know my math is quite simplistic... I'
m ignoring times when both blinds
act after the
steal attempt, I'
m disregarding
steal attempts from the cutoff, and I'
m not analyzing
post-
flop play and the effect of c-bets. I also probably made some mistakes

But I think it's pretty obvious from this very simple analysis that stealing is +EV. The blinds have to be defending a HUGE amount of the time for it not to be. Please feel free to challenge my math or assumptions.