Restealing your way to glory

The play in no-limit Texas hold’em tournaments has changed significantly over the last five years. With the number of players blooding themselves on the internet and the wealth of poker training sites and learning resources, how people play is no longer a matter of just what cards they’re holding. The game has become so much more than that, and one of the concepts that has emerged is restealing.

Restealing, explained simply, is reraising a player with a marginal hand when you believe they are stealing themselves. Your goal when restealing isn’t to win at showdown, it’s to get your opponent to fold preflop. Restealing works because the opponent who has opened the action has usually done so with a marginal hand and cannot withstand the heat of a re-raise.

Don’t kid yourself

A common mistake players make when talking about restealing is something along the lines of the following. They’ll be talking to their poker buddies and say, “It folded to the button who raised three times the big blind. I knew he was stealing. I looked down at pocket Nines and decided to resteal, making it ten big blinds to go.” Re-raising with a legitimate hand is not restealing. If instead our hero had a hand like 7-3 offsuit and had reraised the same amount, then he could have said he had made a resteal. It’s important to always recognise what you’re doing and why at the poker table.

It’s important to know that restealing is not only a viable strategy to add chips to your stack, but also a way to understand what players are doing against you. If you open with a hand like A-J from the cut-off and find yourself facing a re-raise from the blinds, don’t automatically assume that your opponent has a monster. It’s highly possible, especially in this day and age against a good aggressive player, that they could be coming over the top of you with nothing thinking that you are stealing. Use what you know about your opponent to help you make your decision. If they’ve been playing ultra-tight, then folding might be the right thing. If it's someone who has been mixing it up a lot, however, you might want to consider coming back over the top of them rather than laying your hand down.