Cold Calling the Small Blind and the Big Blind

We've recently examined opening ranges for the early and mid positions, the Cutoff, the Button, and the Small Blind.

Now it's time to look at the cold calling strategy in the blinds, positions where you're almost guaranteed to lose money. As a result, your goal should be to lose as little as possible.

Let’s start with the math.

When you’re in the Big Blind, you put 1 BB into the pot before seeing your cards. If you fold every hand preflop, you lose 1 BB each time.

This results in a win rate of −100 BB/100 hands, which is clearly unsustainable.

That’s why defending your Big Blind matters. Every time you call, your goal is simple: to achieve a better result than folding — even if that still means losing money overall.

The same idea applies to the Small Blind. If you folded every hand, your baseline would be −50 BB/100 hands.

However, this is where the similarities end.

While GTO suggests defending the Big Blind by calling frequently, the Small Blind should be played very differently. In practice, you should almost never cold call from the Small Blind.

Why You Shouldn’t Cold Call in the Small Blind

There are a few reasons to adopt a 3-bet-or-fold strategy in the Small Blind.

First, you are always out of position postflop — often against multiple opponents. This makes realizing your equity much harder.

Second, calling caps your range and invites the Big Blind to squeeze. When that happens, the action reopens and the original raiser can still re-raise, turning your call into dead money. Even if both players continue, you often end up in a large pot, out of position, against strong ranges.

Finally, you want to build bigger pots with your strongest hands. By 3-betting, you also lower the postflop stack-to-pot ratio, which reduces your opponents’ positional advantage and simplifies decision-making.

That’s why, unless the game is extremely soft, you should avoid cold calling from the Small Blind. Even in softer environments, calling too wide will quickly become a leak — playing out of position in multiway pots is simply too difficult to do profitably.

The graphic above summarizes how you should construct your Small Blind range against a Button open.

As you can see, at low stakes, the GTO strategy includes very little calling. For context, let’s compare this to how much the strategy changes in the Big Blind versus the Button.

Defending the Big Blind vs Small Blind

Now let’s shift one seat to the left — into the Big Blind.

Defending the Big Blind correctly is a must-have skill for any winning poker player.

Most of the time, you will be out of position when defending against an open raise — a topic we’ll cover in a separate article. The only spot where you have position is when facing a Small Blind open, and since it’s less complex, we’ll start there.

Let’s first define the spot. In the BB vs SB scenario:

• you have position throughout the entire hand
• at 100 BB, the flop SPR is around 16 (97 BB effective stacks and a 6 BB pot)
• at low stakes (meaning higher rake), the Small Blind typically plays a raise-or-fold strategy, opening around 37.4% of hands
• as the Big Blind, you should call around 52% of hands and 3-bet about 13%

Of course, real opponents won’t follow GTO perfectly. However, because you are in position, realizing your equity — even without precise adjustments — is much easier than when defending out of position.

You can study this spot in detail using PLO Genius. For now, let's start with a practical overview of the overall strategy.

Against an SB raise as a BB player, you should:

• 3-bet all of your AA combos
• defend all of your KK and QQ combos, raising the best ones
• defend all double paired hands
• defend most of the connected hands (folding ones with deuce and/or tray)
• defend most of the connected pairs (fives and higher)
• defend almost any suited Ace
• fold trips and unconnected tri-suit hands

The Only Easy Blind Battle

Defending the Big Blind versus the Small Blind is a great starting point for learning how to defend against open raises.

Visualizing your full range is never easy in PLO, but this is the only spot where you defend preflop and still have position. This makes it much easier to realize your equity and recover from small mistakes.

The real challenge begins when you defend the Big Blind against in-position opens — and that’s what we’ll cover soon.