Re-stealing

If you regularly play multitable tournaments, both live and online, you will often find yourself in a position where the size of your chip stack becomes very awkward to play with. Once you are down to between 15 and 25 big blinds, you have too large of a stack to simply move all-in with but it is too small to raise and then have to fold.

Once you are down to this number of big blinds, one option available to you, though not one I could recommend, would be to blind yourself down whilst waiting for a premium hand. This is extremely risky as you may not get dealt a good hand before your chips run out or your chips stack may become so small that even when you do find aces in the hole, you get three or four callers to your shove.

 Whilst a 15-25 big blind stack is not the nicest stack to play, it does open the door to a powerful move known simply as the re-steal. Basically, all you need to do is wait for someone to raise, preferably first-in in late position so there is a higher chance the raise is a steal attempt and then re-raise all-in.

 The move is high risk and works best against loose poker players with deep stacks as this player type is more likely to be stealing very lightly, which should leave you to pick up the blinds, antes and the chips used in the initial steal attempt. If your re-steal is successful you will usually add at least an extra five or six big blinds to your stack, a very helpful amount indeed.

 So which hands should you be re-stealing with? Many players see an ace in their hand and in an instant poker chips are flying into the middle of the table, however this probably is not the best idea unless it is a premium ace or one that is suited. This is because a lot of the time you re-steal with an ace, you will find that you are dominated by a better one. Suited connectors are brilliant for re-stealing, in fact nine-eight suite fairs much better against ace-king offsuit than ace-three does, despite the latter being a stronger hand. Pairs are also good for this as you are almost always going to be getting your money in at least a slight favourite over your opponent's range.

 

View the original article here