You are getting short stacked in a tournament, the blinds are getting bigger and there are antes to pay every hand. You know you have to make a play soon and you can’t wait for Aces or Kings, there just isn’t enough time. What you don’t want to do is fold and have the blinds and antes keep draining your chipstack. We call that getting ‘blinded off’ or ‘anted off’.

Seldom does a player actually get blinded off but they do get so short stacked by the blinds and antes that when they do push all-in their stack is so small that it threatens no one and they will get called by a big stack with a marginal hand. So a cardinal rule of tournament play is: “Don’t get blinded off.” You need to make a stand before you have so few chips that you will automatically get called by a big stack.

There is another use of the term “blinded off”. If a player leaves the tournament or perhaps doesn’t return for a day two of a multi-day tournament, his or her stack will pay the blinds and antes as they come around and they will indeed be blinded off. A stack that is blinded off can finish in the money and is entitled to the share of the prize pool, you need not be present to cash in a tournament.

-this is Beginner’s Poker Blog Post #169

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 23rd, 2008 at 9:41 am and is filed under Poker Basics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.