Home Games: Don’t Make the Blinds Too Big
I’ve found a new pet peeve when it comes to playing in home games that I don’t have when I play poker online: infinite blind raises, those house poker games where the blinds keep raising exponentially to the point where strategy goes right out the window.
I was at a home game a few weeks ago, and I was doing pretty darn well. I was hanging at the top two or three chip positions for the majority of the night, and I had just made my way to the top of the chip stack food chain, when the proprietor of the game decided to double the blinds. Again. We’d been playing for a good four hours, and the blinds had been doubling every half hour. This last raise had pushed things into the ridiculous-each time the big blind went around, I was going in for almost a quarter of my stack, and remember, I was the big blind.
Essentially, every hand turned into an all in moment, because if you were the big blind, you were pot-commited. Strategy was gone, the game was all about who had the best cards. It took one round for me to lose the chip lead, and before I knew it, I was out of the money and the chips were getting shuffled around the table with every hand.
If you’re hosting a home game, cap the blinds at some point. Otherwise, the whole night’s work can be for nothing when blinds turn the whole night into a game of chance. Either that or just practice somewhere else like Everest Poker.