Would a big blind ante work online?

I said it before, and I'll say it again: whoever invented the big blind ante should be automatically inducted into the Poker Hall of Fame. If you are relatively new to the game, you may not understand why I'm so evangelical about it, but anyone who played poker before it was a thing knows why.

The previous way the game was played was that everyone would put in a smaller ante every single hand. This really slowed down the game, as there would always be one person who wasn't paying attention and had to be reminded by the players or the dealer.

As much as I like to blame younger players looking at their phones, in my experience, it always tended to be older gentlemen for whatever reason.

Strategy differences

I recently posted a quirky satellite hand online, which I reviewed on this site. A few people told me when I posted it on social media that their decision would be different based on whether regular antes were used or big blind antes. And this is actually true. There are strategic differences between how you should approach them, which the solvers have shown us.

There are unusual satellite spots like the ones I posted this week. There are strategic considerations which centre around whether the rule in the card room is ante first or big blind first when a player with a micro stack is the big blind. And perhaps most significant is how it changes the heads-up stage of a poker tournament. When the big blind ante is used all the way to heads-up, it essentially makes 100% of hands playable. This is because it doubles the big blind, so there is so much more in the pot to play for.

All of which made me wonder: is it about time that online poker sites started using the big blind ante in their games? Most online poker sites use the old format where every player pays an ante every hand because online poker does not have the logistical headaches that live poker does. There is no need to prompt every single player every hand, it happens automatically. The big blind ante essentially fixed a problem that was unique to live poker and not necessary online.

A problem that doesn't need fixing?

From a nerdy strategy perspective, it would be nice if online poker incorporated the big blind ante. It would make online and live poker strategy decisions parallel. It would make the heads-up stage, for example, consistent both live and online, as the two play out very, very differently.

It would also make an online player's first steps into live poker a little bit more familiar. The big blind ante is something you have to explain to live poker players the first few times that they play live, and we probably wouldn't have to do this if it was commonplace online.

The big blind ante was only there to solve a live poker problem, and there was clearly consensus in the poker world that the old ante system was the superior one if everyone was able to implement it perfectly. So, in that respect, making big blind ante part of online poker would be solving a problem that doesn't need fixing. It's also an unnecessary cost for an online poker operator to significantly change the way their tournaments are structured just to be consistent with their live poker counterparts.

Having said that, it would be fun to see one of the more maverick operators, like CoinPoker or GGPoker, switch things around, if only to see how popular or even noticeable it is.