The Resteal is a great move if your steals aren’t working. They work much better if your chip stack is such that either you’d be forced to call an all in with a reraise, or if your opponent rereraised your reraise, he would be committed to the hand, and forced to call a rerereraise all in.
When you have 10-22 big blinds, you want to consider looking for a spot to resteal, except your resteal is going to have to basically be all in. The more chips you have, the better your hand range needs to be. You can move in most of your chips and leave some behind if you think it will make it look like you want action, or for psychological reasons, but it pretty much is all in or fold if you’re faced with a raise.
But also, when you have 55-150 big blinds you want to consider the resteal as well. Your opponents may push over your reraise, but if they do, the push will be big enough that you can get them back later when the blinds are higher and you have a big enough hand to call an all in. As you get above 80 big blinds, the resteal works but for different reasons. Now rather than your opponent being in a spot where if he reraises all in the bet is too big, but if he reraises small he’s committed to calling an all in… instead your opponents rereraise gives YOU the ability to move all in on the by putting in the last 4th all in bet, without your bet being too large. And now he’s forced to call or fold. The difference is, your push isn’t going to be overly larger than his rereraise.
The way it works is generally when you have the amount of chips where a resteal makes sense, usually making a regular steal doesn’t, and vise versa. You still might make a steal knowing that you’re pot committed to calling an all in or knowing that your opponent can move in with a reasonable reraise all in. But in this case, you will have a big hand a much higher percentage of the time. If you havd 15 big blinds, a standard 3 or 4 times the big blind raise is going to be too large because your opponent can move all in on you, and you will have to fold too many hands to be able to make up for what you lose by calling.
You have to always be thinking about how your opponents might counter you. You don’t want to give them the ability to move all in, unless their move in is too large to make sense. If they are likely to make a too large of an over raise anyways, you can reraise less often,and do so when you have more chips. That’s not to say you won’t ever reraise when you have 35 big blinds, just that when you do, you almost always have a big hand that you can call an all in with. Sure some opponents might figure it out, but there’s ways to counter that.
Again you need to apply game theory. So if you reraise and you are rerereraised, you ahve to be able to move all in 1/3 or 4 times so you can win everything back and then some.
Ideally you don’t want to have to move all in on a resteal, so you want to resteal when you have 50-150 big blinds. If your opponent would steal to 3 big blinds, you would resteal attempt to maybe 9, and your opponent would reresteal to 27. But if you have 50 big blind, his raise is actually risking significantly more, as if you had 50, you could push in, and he would HAVE to call you. You are making him risk a lot more than 27, without realizing it. But if he pushed in from 9 to 50 big blinds, the raise would be a larger raise. This is even more true if you both have 70 big blinds. You should generally play tighter when you will be in the position where you will either have to call an all in, or move all in when your opponent will have to call. You won’t have any fold equity if your opponent decides to play aggressively. But if you have 80 big blinds or so, you have some fold equity, and when you have a big hand, you can still get your opponent pot committed by making a small raise that he almost has to call, and after the flop he’ll have invested too many chips where he’ll be pot committed. The idea is the more that you can stand to win when faced with aggression, the more hands you can play profitably. Note I say CAN not must. This is true for raises as well. On the other hand, when you get more short stack you are more desperate to get chips, but you also have less ability to do so.
But it’s important you understand all of this and also you will want to vary the size of your reraises so you won’t get put in an akward position, you can actually reraise with 200 big blinds or more if you just make your reraises larger. you could simply reraise to 15 big blinds, and move in over a rereraise.
A lot of the concepts of reraising are still the same, you generally want to be able to get away with it without risking much, but when you do have a hand, you are able to get a lot more chips.
But you will need to not only vary the size of your raise, but also the strength of your hand that you reraise with. For example…
With over 80 big blinds, you can reraise with more hands, because if you are rereraised, you can fold, and then just move in when you ahve a hand. In addition if you are called, you have better implied odds. The idea is you will be able to fold 3 times, rereraise on the 4th, and make up for everything you lost and then some. So you make it 9, they make it 27, and you fold 3 times, and then on the 4th, you move in and make 27 getting everything back, plus the blinds. When the move is all in, your opponents can’t call.
On the other hand, when you have 50 big blinds, if you raise, your opponent can reraise to 27, but your rereraise to 50 is going to force him to call with any two because of the pot odds. So now you need to make sure that you have a stronger reraise hand range, because your only equity is in calling the all in, or moving all in and your opponent calling. In other words, there’s no value in your opponnt folding after he puts in another raise over the top of your reraise.In addition, if he does move in, his all in is significantly more reasonable than the all in you’ll face if you both have over 80 big blinds.
In general, don’t put over 15% of your stack on the line without a big hand ever*. We will talk about exceptions, but that’s a good rule of thumb, and usually you want to aim for maybe 7% of your stack as it will generally put you in the best situation.
Of course when you are reraising you need a much stronger hand than when you raise. We will tak about this in the next post.