Blind Man’s Bluff Turbo No Limit Holdem Strategy Guide

[Dice Man]

Some of us were playing this game at the Pokerplex last night and Matt asked me to make a thread about my strategy for this game.

Some of it is fairly simple. I think it can be explained in terms of game theory. In particular thinking about what is common knowledge and private knowledge, a bit like this thread from a while ago:

Difficult Question

( I don't really recommend anybody read through all of that as it's pretty epic)

This thread is pretty long, so I've tried to break up individual points into paragraphs, even when some of them are still related to each other. (i.e. when I wrote these they were a few very long paragraphs)

For those that don’t know, the game is No Limit Holdem but you can’t see your own hole cards. Instead you hold them on your head so that everybody else can see them. We played with stacks of about 3000 chips, blinds starting at 25-50 and doubling (moreorless) everytime somebody was eliminated (with 7 starters), and someone was usually eliminated every 2-3 hands.

Firstly, as soon as all the cards are dealt everybody looks around at everybody else’s cards. Of all the cards they can see they consciously work out who has the best hand, and then (subconsciously?) spend more time looking at that hand than any other. If you’re playing a game like stud multi-handed, you need to be looking at all the face-up cards all the time, you can’t just memorise them and focus on something else. So it’s not too difficult playing Blind Man’s Bluff to work out if you have the best hand. You see who has the best hand you can see and then you observe all the players to see if they give more attention to your hand or their hand.

Sometimes a few hands will get equal attention, for example AKs and 99, because everybody perceives these hands to be about as good. If you think you have one of the top 3 hands then you can probably bluff those who have equally good hands off of theirs if they haven’t worked out everything I’ve spelled out in this paragraph.

Likewise if nobody is looking at you after first seeing what you have, it’s likely that you have something boring and rubbish and probably not worth playing from any position. You have to realise that the players in this game have probably played a lot of regular Holdem. Imagine you are playing online poker. If you get dealt J4o, you usually check the insta-fold box and don’t look at it again. If you have a monster, QQ-AA it’s usually hard to not keep staring at it. Those hands are aesthetically pleasing to us. Even hands like KQs are quite interesting and worth looking at several times, and most of us don’t realise we even do this. When you’re playing Blind Man’s Bluff and have to keep looking around to update your memory of what hands are out there, your eyes are going to be subconsciously drawn to the best and most interesting hands, the ones that you think are your biggest obstacles to winning the pot perhaps. So if you pay a lot of attention to where people are looking you can determine how strong your hand is and even what kind of hand it is.

Furthermore, when a player folds they put their cards face-up on the table so that they can see what they folded, for the reason that it shouldn’t make any difference anymore because everybody else had already seen those cards, plus it’s more fun. But it does make a difference because you can tell what cards that player can see when they fold their hand. If they are happy with the fold, and their hand isn’t complete rubbish (say it is J9s), then it’s probable that someone on the table has them dominated and they’re glad to be out of the pot. Can you see a hand that dominates J9? No? Then you probably dominate it and have one of those cards plus a higher one, or a PP of either. They might even sneak a quick glance at the hand that beats them. Remember, they're out of the hand and probably drunk, so they don't really care about giving free information to the table, plus you can't really criticise somebody for looking somewhere can you? Especially when they can't even help it.

An advanced strategy: If somebody has J9 and someone else JK, and if the J9 guy folds, you might want to be looking at the JK person at the right time to see if he is observing the J9 guy take a quick glance directly at JK guy's hand (note: not eye contact, but eye to forehead contact), thus giving him information about his hand (if he is good at this game). Unfortunately you can't be looking in two places at once so it's tough to implement this kind of information. (Just consider that the J9 guy is almost certain to look at the JK and then express relief at folding, so it's more +EV to watch the JK guy and whether he notices eye-to-his-forehead action from J9 guy.)

If the player that has the best hand you can see folds, (say A7) and then doesn’t express any annoyance at folding the best hand, then it must be because there is a better hand out there that you couldn’t previously see, i.e. your hand. If players fold a PP and are glad to be out, there is probably a higher PP out there. If you can’t see it, it’s probably you.

The game is harder to play with several players, especially in early position. You’re better off folding pre-flop if there are 3 or more players left to act behind you, because it’s easier to control the pot with less players. With more players you have to take account of more (often bad or random) strategies and it’s harder to work out where you are.

When it gets short-handed players will only bet for 2 reasons: either because they can see really good cards or really bad cards. If they can see average hands then they will tend to either limp or fold because they have no real value in betting an unknown hand against average hands. When players bet, it is mostly because they see good cards and want the satisfaction of bluffing somebody off a good hand. Normally in poker people say that expressions of strength mean weakness and vice versa. The same is true in Blind Man’s Bluff. If a player bets aggressively at you it’s likely you have a decent hand. Of course they can make this “bluff” while having a strong hand themselves which they can’t see, so you have to act based on what hand they have. Each hand will depend on context but I’d say a general guide would be that if a player bets aggressively at you and they have say K8o, it’s borderline to you. It might be easier to call if they have A2, because of your chances of having them dominated or having a pair, and A2 isn’t much of a favourite against average hands, or even rubbish like 73o.

There is also the dimension of squeeze plays. Suppose the player in the BB has a monster like AA. If you bet in early or middle position to bluff them off it, then a player in slightly later position is probably going to think “That guys got the right idea, but he’s got bad cards, so I’ll go over the top.” That’s why it’s best to fold in early position, because if you raise then players with position on you will attempt to hijack your play and use it against you. If you are in late position and there have been several raises before you, it’s quite probable that you’re the one being targeted by the bluffers, and hence you have the strong hand. You can know this by seeing the hands of the other players in late position. If someone else has a strong hand then it’s probably them being squeezed out and not you.

I’ll use some Ann and Bob-style examples to make some points better. Suppose the following scenario:

Charles posts small blind
Dietrich posts big blind
Ann is UTG
Bob is UTG+1
You are the button.

Suppose that Ann sees that Dietrich has AA, and being drunk or an idiot, Ann decides she is going to bluff him off it. (If you are any player on the table, who does Ann look at when she makes this raise? If it’s you then you’re probably the target of the raise) Bob is next to act and sees that Ann is holding 63o or some rubbish. Bob’s thought process might be: “I like Ann’s bluff, but I’m surely beating 63o so I’ll re-raise and isolate her.” If you are UTG, you should think that Bob is only playing against Ann at this point, and wants everybody else to fold. It might even be the case that Bob can see that you, Charles and Dietrich have good hands, but he doesn't care because he's now only concentrating on bluffing out AA and isolating 63o.
There could be any number of idiots after Bob who sees that Ann has 63o and Bob has 74o, and have the same idea as both Ann and Bob. That’s a bad strategy. Just don’t get involved in early position like Ann and Bob. You're likely to just end up all in with Q9o vs 63o and 74o, which isn't that +EV.

You also need to take account of other people playing a good strategy like the one in this thread. You need to work out whether the players with the best hands have worked out they’ve got the best hands. If you are Charles in the above example, and all the Anns and Bobs have raised to bluff Dietrich off the pot, and all of the raisers have bad hands too, you have to ask if it’s really worth it to get involved in this hand. Has Dietrich worked out that he’s being targeted? If he has then you need to get out ASAP. Likewise if you are Dietrich and you can see players to your right are considering whether you’ve worked out how strong you are, and wimping out, then you are strong.

You can express to others that you know you are strong, but you can’t exactly bluff this if you are wrong, because they know better than you how strong you are.

You need to use good old-fashioned tells to tell whether when somebody looks at your hand they are seeing a good or a bad hand. As mentioned, they look longer at better hands but in a HU situation they could bluff this sort of behaviour and get you to think you are strong when you have rubbish. When it’s HU the best player will generally be the one who can read the other’s tells and betting behaviour better.

When a player is looking at the cards on your head and working out what to do, this is quite different from when in regular Holdem they look at their own hand and wonder what to do. Most decent players look exactly the same when they look at their hand, whether it's AA or 72o, and wonder what to do with it. In Blind Man's Bluff their brain will be more stretched trying to compute all the information they have, and mapping the hands they can see to other players and not themselves; trying to will that hand to lose where they'd normally look at a hand and will it to win. So they are more exposed by their facial expressions because they are genuinely thinking hard when they look at somebody else's hand.


I think this game would be better-played as a limit game with few blinds per player, say 25. If it’s NL then it’s too easy for several players to be all in pre-flop with 60 blinds or more, plus the game is more interesting when flops are played. If all the players are short-stacked then it’s still possible to bluff players out in limit so would be better IMO.

If I end up playing this game again with anybody who has read this strategy guide then it will definitely be a lot harder to play against them I think.

[Nick Jones]

The look on your face last night when you folded AA UTG was priceless.

[Dice Man]

Originally Posted by Nick Jones

The look on your face last night when you folded AA UTG was priceless.

Unfortunately that hand happened after I'd explained to everybody that they kept looking at the best hands, so they all conspired against me by paying little attention to it.

[Steve A]

• Drink Beer
• Throw Chips In Pot
• Get Lucky
• Enjoy!

Though I'm sure Dice's strategy is far more sensible, mine worked just as well in the second game!

[lucky_scrote]

Originally Posted by Steve A

• Drink Beer
• Throw Chips In Pot
• Get Lucky
• Enjoy!

Though I'm sure Dice's strategy is far more sensible, mine worked just as well in the second game!

Winner