Two Plus Two Older Archives - Blind Defense (In General)

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Blind Defense (In General)

this is a post I never made but saved in a text file back in May. I wanted to run some hand histories through the converter but never got a chance to. pasting it because it might spark a decent discussion

Out of position, without initiative, and holding a marginal hand, blind defense situations are probably the easiest way to spew chips all over the place. I think a lot of people have problems with it, including myself.

I recently went through my recent blind defense hands and noticed that I was really getting manhandled. So I want to state some goals and post some hands, and hopefully we can all get better at defending.

Note: I don't want see the term "pot odds" referred to preflop play once in this thread. it's a pet peeve of mine. In most cases, they don't apply

Problems:
- We don't have initiative (unless we're 3-betting)
- We're out of position
- we often have a weak or marginal hand

Advantages:
- We're in for one bet already, so it only costs one more
- Headsup, high card strength matters less, as a pair of 6s will win almost as much as a pair of 9s. As a result we're rarely much of an underdog.
- We (hopefully) have an edge on our opponents.

Solutions:
- To combat a lack of initiative, we can 3-bet preflop or check raise or weak lead the flop. I don't really like the weak lead, especially if you're weak.
- We need to get to showdown as often as we can. This is is citical in making sure you win close to as much as you should. For example, if you have 54 against QJ, you'll win 37% of the time hot and cold, but if you're checking and folding the flop 90% of the time, then you're obviously going to win less than 10% of the time.
- Along the same lines we need to win a lot with the worst hand without a showdown to make up for us folding too much.
- There's no solution for being out of position.
- We can't fold too much, or we're just throwing away money by calling preflop.
- All the while, we need to realize that we only invested 1 SB preflop to protect a 2.5 (or 2.4) SB pot. If we end up spewing postflop, it'll end up costing us a lot more, and it's just not worth it. The goal is to outplay our opponents postflop, while not letting them make auto-money by raising our blind.

So now that we have a bunch of goals with no real direction, I'll post some hands that I'm not sure of. I probably misplayed most of them, which is good, because there shouldn't be too many "standard. next" type posts. Critiques of misplayed hands often make for the most informative threads.

Before I start, I think it's important to mention that since we want to make money postflop, it's probably best to avoid TAG's because even though they're less likely to be unpaired (meaning we're less often a big underdog), they will make less mistakes