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Everytime the small blind and big blind hit the table, imagine that you own a piece of it. You're entitled to a piece of it. At a ten handed table, even before you get your cards, you own a tenth of the money on the table. Once you get your cards, this equity changes, for better or worse. The better you are at estimating your equity, the better you will play. If you're serious about getting better at this game, download Equilab. Examine preflop, flop, turn, and river decisions.
When you sit down at the table and you have the option to post the big blind, or maybe post in the cutoff, or maybe buy the button, etc, you're not just paying for one hand. You're paying the price to be a part of the game for that whole round. I used to be a hot head and when people gave me a hard time about beating them with a hand that they thought was a bad hand, I would say stuff like, "I paid my blinds and I'll play my cards however the **** I want to." Haha. Now I'm much more reserved, but the moral of the story is that you get cards to play; these cards represent your ownership, read: equity, of the pot. Then you get investment options as the hand progresses. If you're an expert, you'll be making nothing but positive returns on your investments; if continuing is unprofitable, you can always fold for free. If you're a bad card player, you'll make lots of negative return investments in addition to your good investments.
So what's all that mumbo jumbo mean in layman's terms?
Well for starters, think about the "free" positions. These positions aren't really free, because you presumably paid your blinds to receive cards for the entire round. However, once the blinds have been paid, for all expected value estimation purposes, they are free positions. A good player's ev from all of the free positions will be in the positive expectation column. The sum of the evs of these free positions will counteract the ev loss that occurs for everyone in the blind bet positions. Some players don't win enough money in the free positions to counteract this blind bet ev loss enough to make them a long term winner. This is either because they play too many negative expectation hands or because they don't play enough of the positive expectation hands. Either way, they're gonna lose money in the long run. Good players will have such a high expected value in the free positions, that the ev loss in the blind positions is overcompensated, which will produce a positive winrate.
Once you pay your blinds, you own a share of each and every pot, that is until you fold, which is essentially your forfeiture of your share, and your equity.