Explanation of Stealing
Any open-raise from the CO, BTN and SB is considered a “steal” attempt. It’s common to aggregate the stealing frequencies of these three positions and refer to this as ATS (attempt to steal) frequency.
Any open-raise with the intention of picking up the preflop blinds/antes can also be referred to as a steal, regardless of the variant.
Re-raises against a steal attempt can be referred to as “resteals”.
Example of Stealing used in a sentence -> Perfecting the art of button and small blind stealing is a great way to improve our winrate in Hold’em.
How to Use Stealing as Part of Your Poker Strategy
The frequency with which a player attempt to steal on the first betting round depends on a number of variables.
- If players behind are folding too often to steal attempts, we can increase our stealing frequency.
- If players behind are playing badly on the later streets we can increase our stealing frequency.
- If players behind are re-stealing hyper aggressively or playing exceptionally well on the later streets we can reduce our stealing frequency.
In variants with a dealer button, we steal most frequently from the button, followed by the small-blind, followed by the cutoff.
Rough steal recommendations for No Limit Hold’em -
BTN – 48%
SB – 36%
CO – 27%
See Also
