The Blinds

In order to make sure that there is always action in a Texas Hold’em hand there are forced bets, bets that are required to be placed into the pot. Two players has to post the forced bet and it is what starts the hand. It is the two players on the button's left that posts the "blinds". It is called blinds as it is bets made before the cards are seen. The 2 blinds are: the Small Blind and the Big Blind.

- Small Blind (SB), the player to the dealers immediate left posts half a small bet

- Big Blind (BB), the player to the left of the small blind post a whole small bet.

Our example follows a fixed-limit (FL) game with the betting structure: FL $2-$4. This means that the amount of all bets are fixed and that a small bet (used in the first two betting rounds) is $2 and that a big bet (used in the last two betting rounds) is $4.

So in our example the small blind being half a small bet is $2/2 = $1 and the big blind is $2.

This is only one example, there are of course other betting limits eg FL $0.02-$0.04 or FL $50-$100. There are different betting structures as well, mainly no-limit (NL) and pot-limit (PL) but we will talk about this later on.

Before we move on to the pocket cards we will just mention that the number of and the sizes of the blinds can be different. The small blind can be as little as one-third or as much as two-thirds the size of the big blind but that is not common in online poker rooms. On to the cards!