Blinds in Poker

The big blind is normally equal to the minimum bet at the table, and the small blind is normally half of it. When half the big blind is an awkward amount, the small blind is rounded to the nearest practical value, usually downwards.

Take a €1/€2 cash game. The player directly left of the button posts €1, the next player posts €2, and the pot holds €3 before a single card has been seen, which is one and a half minimum bets.

Once the cards are out, the first player to the left of the big blind acts first and must call at least €2, raise or fold. The blinds are live bets, so the €2 already posted counts towards whatever that player owes if someone raises, and the big blind keeps the option to check or raise when nobody has raised before the flop. Heads-up play is the one standard exception to the seating: with only two players, the button posts the small blind and the other player posts the big blind.

The button moves one seat to the left after every hand, so every player pays both blinds once per orbit.

Blinds belong to flop-style poker played between players, mainly Hold’em and Omaha, and they are absent from games such as Seven-Card Stud. They are also absent from casino-banked poker variants like Casino Hold’em in a live casino lobby, where the player puts up an ante against the house rather than posting a blind against other players.

In a cash game the blinds stay fixed for as long as the table runs. A €0.50/€1 table remains €0.50/€1 whether you sit down at the start of the evening or three hours later.

Blind levels in tournaments

Tournaments work differently, because the blinds rise on a schedule called the blind structure. Each period at one size is a level, and when the clock runs out the next, larger level begins, which forces action and brings the event to an end. A common sequence runs 25/50, 50/100, 75/150 and 100/200, though the exact values and the length of each level are set by the organiser, and practice varies widely between sites and events.

The useful habit is to count a stack in big blinds rather than chips. A 10,000-chip stack is 100 big blinds at 50/100 but only 20 big blinds at 250/500, and the second position is far more urgent even though the chip count has not moved.

Faster formats such as turbos shorten the levels, so the same stack shrinks relative to the blinds more quickly.

The term most often confused with blinds is the ante, and both are forced bets, so the table below sets out who pays each one and whether it counts towards a call. The definitions follow standard Hold’em rules; individual rooms can vary the details in their house rules.

The most frequent mistake is treating the blind as a fee, like a table charge, when it is a genuine bet that the poster can win back along with the rest of the pot. The rake is the fee; the blind is stake money that has simply been committed early.

A second misreading is that the blind positions are unlucky seats. Over a full orbit every player posts the same amount, so the cost is shared evenly, and a run of poor hands from the big blind proves nothing about the seat itself.

Blinds are also not the same as a minimum buy-in. A €1/€2 table describes the forced bets, while the amount you may bring to the table is a separate limit that each operator sets in its own terms, so it is worth reading the table information rather than assuming one figure from the other.

One session in the blinds tells you very little.