Marcus Bateman / Marcus Bateman / 21 October 2008 / Leave a comment

The single most important feature of poker are the forced bets. Without these, all the action would stagnate, players would only play aces and the game would have died a long time ago. By forcing players to put in a bet without seeing their hand, you create the conditions that make poker such an incredible game.

This key point seems to be frequently forgotten by no limit hold'em players, who think of poker more as a game of trapping people for that monster pot. Although winning big pots through deception is part of poker, the conditions that allow it only come about because of the fact the game has blinds and antes.

Every time you sit down at a poker table, your single goal is to identify the best way to win as many blinds as possible. Sometime this can be best achieved by playing tight, because the players around you are playing too loose and giving away too many blinds in big pots; or by playing loose and stealing lots of blinds or antes because players are playing too tight.

Whichever strategy you have to adopt, remember that attacking the blinds is the simple and only goal at any poker table - they are the lifeblood of the game and the only thing allows for skilled players to win consistently. This is most apparent in tournaments, where players start to see the fundamental importance of blinds as they rise very high in relation to their stack size, and players have to make desperate plays in any situation possible to stay alive.

Playing lots of deep stacked cash games can quickly make a player start to forget about how important the blinds really are, as they seem so small compared to not only your stack, but that juicy looking one across the felt that your opponent is sitting behind. Yet if you look at the best cash games players, they win their money actually quite slowly, usually at the rate of between five and ten big blinds per hundred hands. Although they are frequently playing pots that are far out of proportion to the blinds (frequently as big as two or three hundred times the blind), over the long run they are actually just grinding out a few extra blinds out of their opponents.

Always keep your eyes on the prize - focus on trying to devise the best strategy to win as many blinds as possible, not just on trying to trap the table fish.

Get 40% rakeback at Betfair Poker