You’re Playing The Big Blind WRONG!! [Here’s Why]

Playing hands from the big blind is one of the toughest situations in poker. You're forced to play out of position, and favorable pot odds often compel you to continue with marginal and weak hands. However, you’re playing the big blind wrong, and thanks to PeakGTO poker solver and expert instruction from Jonathan Little, you can now go beyond just surviving in the big blind, and you can learn to thrive while crushing your opponents! Here’s why you are playing the big blind wrong!

When playing deep stacked and facing an early position raise, it's important to defend from the big blind with poker hands that have strong postflop playability. Suited hands, for example, tend to perform well because of their potential to make flushes and other disguised draws. In contrast, offsuit hands like A-7, Q-8, or T-7 often have poor playability and can lead to trouble when they make a weak pair. However, as the open raise comes from later positions like the cutoff or button, your defending range from the big blind should widen significantly to include a broader range of hands. Late position opens typically represent a wider range of hands, allowing you to profitably defend with more hands due to better pot odds and the advantage of playing against a range that contains a lot of weak holdings.

A common misconception among poker players is that they should defend with a wider range from the big blind in multi way pots just because they’re closing the action and getting good pot odds. In reality, your defending range should be significantly tighter when more poker players are involved. You should generally stick to hands like suited aces, suited broadways, and pocket pairs. The reason is that in multi way pots, you're far more likely to be dominated preflop, especially with suited hands, and as a result, you'll often end up with the second best hand, which will drastically hurt your win rate.

Jonathan Little analyzes live poker hands from TV poker shows such as Poker After Dark, Hustler Casino Live, The Lodge Poker Club & PokerGO. He also analyzes popular poker vloggers such as Rampage Poker, Brad Owen, Jaman Burton, Ashley Sleeth, Wolfgang Poker and others!

You will also find many poker hands on this channel that contain some of the biggest names in the poker world such as; Daniel Negreanu, Phil Hellmuth, Phil Ivey, Doug Polk, Garrett Adelstein, Tom ‘Durrrr’ Dwan, Dan ‘Jungleman’ Cates, Fedor Holz & many more!

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