What is Big Blind in Poker?

In poker, the big blind is a mandatory payment that must be made by a player in the big blind position before any cards are dealt. In the majority of games, the big blind is twice the size of the small blind. Aside from simply being a forced preflop payment, big blinds are used as a way of measuring stack sizes and other important metrics such as win rate. For example, win rates in poker are described in terms of “big blinds won per hundred hands” . Note that not all poker variants make use of big blinds with Stud games being a notable exception.

October 23 2018

Poker Glossary

Explanation of Big Blind

Big-blinds should not be confused with big-bets. Big-bets are typically twice the size of big-blinds and refer to bet-sizings used in fixed-limit formats of poker.

Being forced to invest a big-blind without first seeing our hole-cards is a big disadvantage in poker. It’s viritually impossible to generate a positive win rate out of the small-blind or big-blind positions at the table.

However, it’s the mandatory blind payments that drive the action. Players are incentivized to play non-premium holdings in an attempt to win the blinds. Without mandatory blind payments, poker would not work well as a competitive game (everyone would wait for the nuts preflop).

Example of Big Blind used in a sentence -> Our opponent had 100 big blinds in his stack but we had him covered with our 250 big blind stack.

See Also

Small-blind, Button, Big-Bet, Nuts