Selecting Your Starting Hands – Part 3

So as you can see, this isn’t quite as cut and dried as a lot of newer players would prefer, and just like everything else in poker, a lot of what you do comes down to how your opponents play. So that brings us to another consideration, which is that the better your opponents, the tighter you are going to want to play, and the weaker they are, the more hands you can play from all positions.

If they are particularly weak, you can play a lot more hands in fact and you’re not going to worry about your position so much. This is even more true if your opponents are weak tight, and tend to fold way too much post flop. So if you’re taking down a lot of pots later, then you are missing out on some real opportunities by folding anywhere near as often as you would against better players. If people let you push them around, by all means do so, until they do something to stop you.

On the other hand, if they tend to be too loose, while you won’t want to play as many hands as you would against tight players, you still are going to want to play a few more against these people. They will pay you off more, so you have better pot odds to play more speculative hands such as lower pocket pairs and suited connectors, as you now have better implied odds with them.

At the same time though you do want to pay attention to their level of aggression and the higher the chance that you’ll get into a raising battle, the more conservative you want to be, as this can limit your implied odds, especially if it chases away most of the looser opponents. So for instance you could be up against a single player with a hand that doesn’t hit anywhere near enough to make sense of putting more chips in the pot, and therefore you would have wasted the money you spent on it.

Whenever you do get raised though, you always want to look to interpret what a raise from this player in this situation means. Some players will raise more with better position, although in some small stake games, some players don’t even pay much or any attention to position. So while you want to track a player’s pre-flop raising in general, you also want to pay close attention to how this breaks down for them by position, if it even does. Knowing how often they raise and therefore what hand strength they tend to raise with is critical information.

This all might not seem as simple as many players would prefer, for instance just telling you to play AQ+ TT+ in a given spot, but that sort of thing only is useful up to a certain point and definitely won’t make you that good of a player, and certainly not a winning player. It’s far more important to look to understand the why here, which comes from thinking more about things. I’ll be looking to get you do more of that as we progress on this topic.