Blockers: A Practical Guide
If you’ve been near a poker table, you’ve likely heard about blockers.
Blockers are interesting in that they are critically important in theory and, in my opinion, often useless (or worse) in practice.
I want to talk to you about how they can impact strategy, how I like to use them, and how I’d suggest you do.
Let’s get into it!
Blockers: Theory
Before moving on, you need to understand the following:
In theory, all players have perfect knowledge of each other's overall strategy, and all ranges are perfectly balanced.
This means that when facing a river bet, you should be indifferent with most of your bluffcatchers, which means that they will break even whether you decide to call or fold.
When this is the case, blockers are hugely important.
Why?
Because if your perfectly balanced opponent is betting the K❤️K♠️8♦️J❤️4♠️ river with a range that contains bluffs and JT or better for value, when you hold a jack in your hand, you have extra information! That jack reduces the number of value bets your perfectly balanced opponent has without reducing their bluffs, so you know they’re no longer perfectly balanced, and you have a profitable call.
If you were to ignore blockers against a perfectly balanced opponent, you’d be making a mistake.
But, guess what…
In Practice
Nobody in the world is perfectly balanced.
In fact, virtually every poker player is so unbalanced that, if you could know their strategy — like all players do in theory-land — you’d likely never use blockers to decide how to play against them.
Does this mean you should ignore blockers in your game?
The answer depends on you and your opponents, so instead of outright telling you what to do, I’ll lay out the factors at play.
The Problems
The main issue I’ve witnessed, as blockers have become a common part of strategy discussion and poker education, is that people are turning off their brains.
They find themselves facing a bet, notice that they have a good blocker, and call because of it.
Or they have the potential to bluff the river, but they don’t have a specific card, so they simply don’t do it.
Thoughts like, “How would my opponent find enough bluffs here?” or, “It seems like this guy always folds to river bets,” aren’t entering their minds.
These are factors that are much more important.
Let’s take a look at a simplified example:
The board is Q♠️ 9❤️ 2♠️ 2♦️ 3❤️
Our opponent bets with a value range of AA, KK, AQ, and KQ. (For the sake of this example, he’d have taken a different line with sets and two pair.)
That’s 12 combos of overpairs, and 24 combos of top pair, for 36 total value combos.
Now let’s say we hold Q♦️T♦️
We have a queen, the best blocker in the deck!
Now our opponent has 12 combos of overpairs, and only 16 combos of top pair, for 28 total value combos.
The best blocker we could hold (in a narrow range, high-impact example) reduced our opponent’s value combos by 22%.
Twenty-Two Percent
In theory-land, 22% is huge!
We’re facing a pot-sized bet. Our opponent is betting 36 value combos and 18 bluffs, for an optimal bluff frequency of 33.3%.
Now that they’ve only got 28 value combos, they’ll be bluffing 18 out of 46 times, or 39% of the time. Easy call.
In practice, however, 22% doesn’t go a long way.
You’ll encounter opponents and board textures on which people are massively underbluffing (or overbluffing).
Your Q♦️ blocker means that the breakeven point for you to call is no longer 18 bluff combos, but 14 bluff combos.
It’s not really that big a difference.
There are plenty of spots where the best in the world
miss over 50% of the theoretically correct bluffs.
How close do you think Jim from your local $2/$5 game is getting?
Or nitty Mark, who hasn’t shown down a big bluff since the ‘90s.
Are you calling him with the Q♦️ blocker?
A great hand reader finds spots where their opponents are massively unbalanced. This is where the big edges in poker come from.
Do you really want to ignore hand reading as soon as you do or don’t have a relevant card?
It’s Not All Bad
There are some good reasons to use blockers in your thought process.
Firstly, there are spots where you’re up against an opponent who’s very balanced in several spots. Against them, sure, that blocker will absolutely move the needle.
Blockers can also make you more balanced.
If you structure your gameplan purely around whether or not you think a play will work, you’d better be really, really good at it.
Otherwise, a strong player will be able to find extra holes in your game.
I usually opt for exploitative play like this – making very strong adjustments to what I perceive as big opportunities – which leaves my game unbalanced. I’m exploitable by choice, and I’m betting on myself staying a step ahead of my opponent in the game of adjustments.
But this is a “don’t try this at home” type of situation. It’s a very difficult style to play when you’re up against strong professionals.
What can happen to some players is that they “make reads” that aren’t actually reads. They are excuses that your mind makes to justify the play that is more comfortable to you.
“I don’t think she’s going to fold here.”
“I bet he’s bluffing too much.”
You tell yourself you’re making these reads, and you end up rarely bluffing and usually calling because that’s what you want to do.
In this way, blockers can make you more balanced by forcing you to make plays that are hard for you to make.
Maybe you don’t enjoy making big river bluffs, but when you have the straight blocker, you feel emboldened.
Good!
Work on your emotional hurdles as well, but for the time being, use blockers to push you to make more of the plays that you need to make.
My Advice
Hopefully, some of the things I said above spoke to you, and you have a good idea of how and when you want to utilize blockers in your decision-making process.
If not, here is my advice:
If you have a somewhat strong read, whether it be during a specific hand or an overall read that your opponent loves to overbet bluff, just ignore blockers and go with your read.
If you have no read at all, use blockers! They are a useful part of basic strategy.
If you have a weak read – a guess that you don’t have a strong reason for or strong feeling about – use blocker logic here, too.
I suggest this because, even if your weak read would outweigh the impact of blockers, this can serve as insurance against your emotions dictating how you play and leaving you unbalanced.
If you’ve followed most of my prior newsletters, you should know that I believe there are countless opportunities to make reads that should impact your default strategy. If you didn’t know that yet, I’d suggest you stick around!
My hope for your game is that you rarely utilize blockers because you’re routinely making strong reads.
