Rising Blinds Lets the Light Shine

In Texas Hold ‘em the blinds are a key area that kick off one of the pressures in the game that establishes the foundations for strategy.

So What does that mean???

Simply put, the minimum bet often is increased throughout the game to push the game along and bring things to a conclusion, otherwise you could find yourself in a never ending game where people sit down at a table with a thousand dollars and only bet when the big and small blinds come there way.  If the Big blind is a dollar that means they could see the Big blind a thousand times and with 8 people that could be 8,000 hands.

That’s way too long, so many games have a mechanism to increase the blinds at certain intervals.  

As an example a blind may increase after every 20 hands, which would be two and a half trips around the table with 8 people playing.  Usually Blinds increase by double their amount.

So if the blinds start off at $1 and fifty cents, they will increase to $2 and $1 for the Big and small blinds respectively.  Then double again to $4 and $2, $8 and $4, $15 and $8 . . .  You get the idea.

So the starting point of the blinds is important to understand.

Cash Flow Management

We mentioned before that its important to monitor your expected Hold em cash flows out so that you can make the best determination as to when you should or have to make your move.

Practical Example

If we have $200, and the blinds are $10 and $5 and increase after the first 10 hands by double and every 10 hands after that, we can determine how many hands we can see just with our blinds bet.  (Note that doesn’t really mean that we are betting anything else, just biding our time.  Obviously we do not want to bide our time out of chips!)

With 4 people playing, we would last for 53 hands with no increase.

But with an increase, every 10 hands it will be very different.

First 8 hands will leave us with $200-$30 = $170

The 8 hands will leave us with $170-$60 = $110

The next 4 hands will leave us with $110 - $60 = $50 and we only have enough at this point for one last Big Blind post of $40 at this point.

So as a last resort, we either need to take our money and run with what we have left in the last 8 hands or we better get some good card . . .

or . . .

We better make something happen ourselves!

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