How a Hand Starts: Blinds and Forced Bets

Every hand of Hold'em has to start somehow, before anyone has looked at a single card. That's the job of the blinds.

Three Seats That Start Every Hand Differently

Three positions matter before a single card is even dealt. The button marks the dealer for that hand, and its seat rotates one player to the left after every hand. To the button's immediate left sits the small blind, who's forced to put money in before seeing any cards. Next to them is the big blind, forced to put in more.

Say the stakes are 1-3: the small blind puts in $1, the big blind puts in $3, both blind, meaning neither of them has looked at their cards yet when the money goes in. It's a forced cost of playing that hand, not a choice.

The player directly to the big blind's left is said to be under the gun, the first person who has to make an actual decision. Their minimum bet is whatever the big blind put in, and the next size up jumps to double that. On a 1-3 game, under the gun's options are call for $3, raise to $6, or raise to something bigger than $6. There's no betting $5. The increments only move in whole big blinds once you're past the first call.

The Straddle: A Blind Bet You Choose to Make

Cash games have one more wrinkle: the blind straddle. It's a voluntary blind bet, usually double the big blind, placed by a player before they've seen their cards, purely to raise the stakes of that one hand. If the game is 1-3 and someone straddles to $6, everyone now has to play around a bigger forced bet than usual.

One version, called a Mississippi straddle, lets any player at the table straddle, not just the one under the gun, though the button always gets first right to it if more than one player wants to. Straddling can run anywhere from double up to five times the big blind, and whoever posts it gets to act last preflop instead of first, a real edge in exchange for putting more money in blind.

You Can Only Bet What's in Front of You

Here's a rule that surprises people who've only seen poker in movies: you can only bet up to the chips you actually have on the table. No pulling out car keys, no signing over a house deed. If you buy in for $200, your entire stack for that hand is $200, called your effective stack, and that's the hard ceiling on every bet you can make.

This single rule is why players at the same table can have wildly different stack sizes, and it's the reason a hand can get complicated fast once more than two players with different stacks all decide to push their chips to the middle at once.

Serious players rarely talk about their stack in dollars anyway. A $300 stack in a 1-3 game is just "100 big blinds." Measuring in big blinds instead of dollars makes the math in every decision from here on much easier, because the size of a bet relative to the pot matters far more than its size in raw dollars.

The Essentials

1. The button, small blind, and big blind are three fixed seats that start every hand, with forced bets from the two blinds before any cards are seen.
2. Under the gun is the first player who gets an actual choice, and the minimum raise doubles the big blind.
3. A blind straddle is a voluntary forced bet that raises the stakes of one hand, in exchange for acting last preflop.
4. You can only ever bet the chips actually in front of you, your effective stack, nothing more.
5. Measuring a stack in big blinds instead of dollars makes reading the size of any bet much easier.

Further Reading

• Book: The Theory of Poker by David Sklansky, the book most serious players point to for the math underneath hands like these.
• Wikipedia: Blind (poker) · Betting in poker