Blind Defense....Asset or Liability?

Lately, I have been giving some serious attention to my play around the button and blinds. One of the biggest weaknesses in my game was always the way I handled blind defense. Over the last 2 months, I've tried to loosen up slightly in the blinds in an attempt to increase my overall earn. Hopefully, I'm making the right move.... /images/graemlins/confused.gif

There have been several posts on here about stats from the SB & BB. I decided to take those a step further and toy around with filters in order to narrow things down a little.
Only problem is I can only compare numbers with a few friends I know. So, I will share with you guys too.....

This is an interesting PokerTracker experiment that may provide some useful information to all of us. (please try not to play along if you have less than 20,000 total hold'em hands):

Set you preferrences to include all of your LIMIT hands with a 1:2 blind ratio (10 max tables are OK to use for this and will help to increase sample size).
**Make sure you DO NOT include NL/PL games, as they will really screw things up**

On the GENERAL INFO page, click the FILTERS button (above the KNOWN STARTING HANDS window).
This will open a window with a ton of options (most of you have been here before).
Under BLIND STATUS, select EITHER BLIND and under STEAL ATTEMPTED AGAINST YOUR BLIND, select STEAL ATTEMPTED.
Hit OK to exit the window and let the known starting hands refresh (if you have a huge database, this may take a bit).

Now, the only hands that show will be ones that you were in either the SB or BB (I'm combining both blinds in order to get a larger sample size) and when there was a steal attempt against you. PokerTracker defines "steal" as the CO, Button or SB open-raising...which is why we can use data from full 10 handed games as well.

Obviously, if we were to fold every one of these hands, we would lose <font color="red">(0.375)</font>bb/hand. The lower we get the red number, the more we save from the <font color="red">(0.375)</font> in these situations, and the more we add to out earn. /images/graemlins/smile.gif

I have 10,279 filtered hands here and am losing <font color="red">(0.22)</font>bb/hand. Intuitively, that seems pretty bad /images/graemlins/frown.gif . However, over the last 2 months (since I've loosened up in my defenses), that number has dropped to <font color="red">(0.20)</font>bb/hand. I'm not sure if there is a correlation, but it can't hurt to get some feedback.

I am curious as to what results you guys have for this experiment. Please try to include number of instances in your response.

Thanks

[bds]

Over 230k hands, my number here is -.21. Interestingly, my stats without filtering are BB -.15 and SB -.09. If I'm interpreting the data correctly, this means that I lose more when a steal was attempted against my blind than I do overall from the blinds. Yet, not defending at all would be an even worse result. Is the relationship between your numbers similar?

[ALL1N]

78k hands over 10/20, 20/40, and 30/60. (0.19BB)

[HesseJam]

[ QUOTE ]
Over 230k hands, my number here is -.21. Interestingly, my stats without filtering are BB -.15 and SB -.09. If I'm interpreting the data correctly, this means that I lose more when a steal was attempted against my blind than I do overall from the blinds. Yet, not defending at all would be an even worse result. Is the relationship between your numbers similar?

[/ QUOTE ]

Interesting. This could either mean that the stealers on average DO have one of the better hands or that you are taking your defense too far down the streets.

Alternatively, it could mean that you are hit hard by the gap concept in these situations and there is nothing you can do about it if the stealing opportunity is exploited correctly by the potential stealers.

[MrBig30]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Over 230k hands, my number here is -.21. Interestingly, my stats without filtering are BB -.15 and SB -.09. If I'm interpreting the data correctly, this means that I lose more when a steal was attempted against my blind than I do overall from the blinds. Yet, not defending at all would be an even worse result. Is the relationship between your numbers similar?

[/ QUOTE ]

Interesting. This could either mean that the stealers on average DO have one of the better hands or that you are taking your defense too far down the streets.

Alternatively, it could mean that you are hit hard by the gap concept in these situations and there is nothing you can do about it if the stealing opportunity is exploited correctly by the potential stealers.

[/ QUOTE ]

Obviously when there is a steal attempted against your blind chances are higher that someone else has a good hand, then when nobody tries to steal.
Also there are situations like when everybody folds to you in the big blind that gets filtered away when you just look at steal attemts.
So the way I see it you are always going to lose more on average when someone tries to steal, just natural.

[ QUOTE ]
Obviously when there is a steal attempted against your blind chances are higher that someone else has a good hand, then when nobody tries to steal.
Also there are situations like when everybody folds to you in the big blind that gets filtered away when you just look at steal attemts.
So the way I see it you are always going to lose more on average when someone tries to steal, just natural.

[/ QUOTE ]

This is true. I put this post up in order to get an idea of how others handle steals against their blinds. The number will always be higher than winrate from the blinds.

Also, besides total number of hands in your tracker, try to include the number of hands in the filtered result. It should be around 5%-7% of total hands.

Thx

Total Hands: 31,252
Filtered Hands: 3,020
Filtered Winrate: -0.26 bb/hand
VPIP SB: 33.36%
VPIP BB: 37.40%

-v

[bds]

[ QUOTE ]
Also, besides total number of hands in your tracker, try to include the number of hands in the filtered result. It should be around 5%-7% of total hands.

Thx

[/ QUOTE ]

Hmm - I get 20,648 out of 229,208 hands, for 9%. Playing too many hands when steal attempted? I wonder...

[bds]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Obviously when there is a steal attempted against your blind chances are higher that someone else has a good hand, then when nobody tries to steal.
Also there are situations like when everybody folds to you in the big blind that gets filtered away when you just look at steal attemts.
So the way I see it you are always going to lose more on average when someone tries to steal, just natural.

[/ QUOTE ]

This is true. I put this post up in order to get an idea of how others handle steals against their blinds. The number will always be higher than winrate from the blinds.

[/ QUOTE ]

This makes sense.

[ QUOTE ]
[Hmm - I get 20,648 out of 229,208 hands, for 9%. Playing too many hands when steal attempted? I wonder...

[/ QUOTE ]

No, that's OK. The sample size is not dependent upon how often you defend. 9% means one of two things:

Either,

You play shorter games i.e. 4, 3, or 2 handed mostly where there are more steals.

OR....

You need to improve on game selection, and find better games with more players seeing the flop.

Hopefully, your game selection is ok. What do you have for average # of players seated at a table? Without looking at tracker, I believe that will show under game notes if you click "get all".


Edit: What is your rate per hand for 20,648 filtered hands?

[bds]

[ QUOTE ]
No, that's OK. The sample size is not dependent upon how often you defend. 9% means one of two things:

Either,

You play shorter games i.e. 4, 3, or 2 handed mostly where there are more steals.

OR....

You need to improve on game selection, and find better games with more players seeing the flop.

Hopefully, your game selection is ok. What do you have for average # of players seated at a table? Without looking at tracker, I believe that will show under game notes if you click "get all".

Edit: What is your rate per hand for 20,648 filtered hands?

[/ QUOTE ]

5.4 average players seated, so it's not that I'm playing very short handed. I also think I have good table selection.

When you ask me what is my rate per hand, are you asking the loss in the hands that the filter identifies? If so, that is -.21. If you are asking something else, I'm not clear on the question.

As other info, I have 70.58 folded SB to steal, 52.59 folded BB to steal. Overall, I lose .15 BB/100 from the BB and .09 from the SB.


This is 10/20 , if that matters. I'm doing some other anaylsis at the moment because this is an area I've been working on also. I'll report the results when done, but I do think I'm playing back too often at steal attempts or not getting out soon enough when I do play back or playing them too passively or ? I think this may be a case of my adding too many hands that I defend with without focusing enough of my attention on:
1. The stats of the steal raiser.
2. The skill necessary to play these hands postflop when the flop misses me, as it usually will.

Your 9% might be closer to an actual number. Out of my 210,000 hands, 80K of them are from non-6 max games. The size of my samples may be smaller because of those, hence the lower %.

Let me know the progress of you analysis.

Thanks.

[aslowjoe]

I am .21 over about 70,000 hands at 5/10. My folded to steal is SB .89 BB .64. So for now my over folding hasn't hurt to much. I keep trying to bring it down but it comes down slowly. I usually avoid short tables.

[bds]

[ QUOTE ]
Your 9% might be closer to an actual number. Out of my 210,000 hands, 80K of them are from non-6 max games. The size of my samples may be smaller because of those, hence the lower %.

Let me know the progress of you analysis.

Thanks.

[/ QUOTE ]

Phase One of the analysis I'm doing is in this thread link (http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/showflat.php?Cat=&amp;Number=3414760&amp;page=0&amp;view=colla psed&amp;sb=5&amp;o=14&amp;fpart=&amp;vc=#Post3414760)

[ucfryan]

70K hands @ 1/2 6m = -.2 BB/hand. Cool thread, thanks for the info.

[cockandbull]

from 20000 hands at 5/10 -0.24.

how low do you go, hand wise?

[ QUOTE ]
how low do you go, hand wise?

[/ QUOTE ]

That all depends on the raiser and which blind you're talking about.

[jlcoleman71]

Losing 0.23bb/hand over 1,512 instances.

[bottomset]

13.2k 3/6
939filtered
-.17BB
7.07% of hands

VPIP BB:41.82/8.74 -.23BB 538hands
VPIP SB:14.22/12.22 -.08BB 401hands