“I’m always looking for a reason to fold out of position.” -Dave Tuchman, Poker Commentator

Some common poker hand odds are open-ended straight draws at 4.8:1, four to a flush at 4.1:1, inside straight (belly buster) at 10.5:1, one pair drawing to two pairs or trips at 8.2:1, overcards on a ragged board on the turn at 6.7:1, drawing to a set at 22:1, and drawing to X outs at (46-X) / X:1.

“Never bring a knife to a sword fight.” -Mark “the Guru” Brement, Poker Coach

We’re told by the experts that a Tight-Aggressive (TAg) approach to poker is the foundation upon which beginners should build a winning strategy. But then in the very next breath, those very same experts tell us that every situation is different, and that a starting hand chart that defines the “Tight” part of TAg is a bad thing to use. They say that a newbie using a position-based rote-style hand chart to decide which hands to fold and which to play will hurt their game in the long run. When talking about hand selection, the experts always say things like “it depends” and every situation is different, which means an ever-changing range of hands to play for optimal results. In contrast, a starting hand chart will negatively affect your future ability to learn to hand read, they say. Starting hand charts are bad, bad, bad!

Bullsh!t Poppycock, I say. Starting hand charts won’t hurt your game—especially in the long run. In fact, learning to play via a chart can and will improve your overall game. In this post, I explain why a starting hand chart is not only a good thing for beginners to use, but should also be something old-timers occasionally employ to reset their game. In other words, why aren’t you using a starting hand chart?

The best preflop hand doesn’t always win, but this isn’t a reason to choose poor starting hands.

photo credit: The hand that beat my rockets via photopin(license)

The Problem Facing Newbie Players (and Oldies, too)

In my experience both playing and teaching poker, I’ve come to realize that beginning players are often overwhelmed by the action at a table. We tell them they need to estimate pot odds, be aggressive, fold trouble hands, embrace bad beats, and try to determine what kinds of opponents they’re facing. We tell them to count the pot and villain’s stack size, estimate implied odds, bet for value, and steal in late position. Bluff, we say, but not too much! Defend your blinds, but not always! And all along, we repeat, “Position, position, POSITION!!” Play aggressive, but above all, play tight in early position and loose in late position!

Ah, but then we refuse to tell them exactly what starting hands they should play in those early and late positions. It’s almost like we expect them to learn a basic starting hand strategy by osmosis. Or, worse, learn by expensive trial and error. Rather than be given some kind of initial guidance that bootstraps their play with safe, conservative advice, the experts instead proclaim that every situation is different, and you will hobble yourself if you learn from a rote list of starting hands. For this (dumb) reason, starting hand charts are regarded as evil incarnate by the “experts.” The professionals argue that you will never learn to hand read and make decisions based on your opponents’ cards if you’re rely on a chart.

I disagree. Strongly. While there is some truth buried in what they say, I believe the experts are missing the bigger picture, and in fact they’re actually slowing the learning process of a new player by eschewing hand charts. I’d go so far to say that many beginning players actually are destined to losing long term precisely because they aren’t using a solid starting hand chart. These player literally never are able to progress to proper hand reading because they themselves never mastered the basics upon which solid play is predicated.

The bottom line is this: newbies don’t have a prayer of learning how to hand read. Hell, they barely are able to remember when it’s their turn to act, let alone put players on ranges and adjust their starting hand selection accordingly. Beginners should not focus on hand reading—at least until they learn and master a number of other, more basic skills first. In my experience, beginners learn the most quickly, and become profitable faster when they are given good, conservative hand selection advice to build a solid TAg foundation upon. This frees their overwhelmed minds to focus on other, more important Level-1 skills. Once they master those skills, we can come back to hand reading and adjusting to all those “it depends” situations.

Good Habits, Bad Habits, And Learning Poker

Scientists used to think that the magic number was three weeks, but modern research now shows that it takes an average of 66 days of disciplined repetition before something new and beneficial like a morning exercise walk or eating lunches become a life habit and not a difficult chore. Bad habits and vices, however, like smoking, are adopted much more quickly. It takes time, repetition, and discipline to make a good habit stick, but only a few reps of a bad habit to get it to insinuate itself into our lives, especially if we are rewarded immediately for that bad action by something like the hit of nicotine in our bloodstreams.

It sucks, but this is our reality—for better or worse, we humans are programmed to adopt bad habits more easily than good ones. This is why it’s so easy to get into the routine of drinking a beer or eating a bowl of ice cream when we get home from a hard day’s work, and its so hard to instead stop on the way home at the gym to workout instead. The former is easy and instantaneously rewards us with a (temporary) feeling of a full, sated stomach; the latter is more difficult to do, and the payoff comes much later in the long run.

Okay, fine. What does this have to do with poker?

Answer: getting into the “habit” of selecting the correct cards to play preflop based on position is very beneficial in the long run, but it takes discipline and repetition to learn this habit. In contrast, playing a shiny-bright trap hand is easy, fun, and gives us the immediate feedback of action and excitement and a shot of adrenaline in the blood stream. It also occasionally pays off via a lucky flop, so our brains feel a double reward for the bad behavior.

Sound familiar? Getting into the habit of playing good cards—and folding the bad ones—is going to take some serious effort–around 66 solid days of disciplined practice before it has a prayer of becoming something you “just do” when you play.

Picking Up Good Habits By Example and Repetition

Some hands you are dealt get processed by your brain by way of what I call “autopilot” mode. For example, when you’re under the gun with 7-2 offsuit, most players, including the majority of beginners, automatically fold. Ninety-nine times out of a 100, this is the correct play and pretty much everyone does it. We all know to fold this kind of hand, so we do.

And when you’re dealt Aces in that same seat? Again there is a correct play (raise*), which again is done 99 out of 100 times by most people who have been around poker for even a little while. Hands like these are known by all of us to be super strong, and the standard, ABC plays we should make with them is to raise. Raising Aces and Kings are the default, standard “correct” play.

Fine. This isn’t really earth-shattering news. But ask yourself this: why do you automatically fold 7-2 offsuit, and automatically raise A-A UTG? Answer: you’ve likely read somewhere that 7-2 is the worst possible starting hand in poker,** and you also know that A-A is the best possible hand. Further, you have seen other, better players play these cards exactly this way. Then you started playing these cards this way, too, and now after a few thousand hands you “automatically” fold and raise them, respectively, when you they’re dealt to you. Said another way, you’ve picked up some good basic habits with 7-2 offsuit and A-A by way of example, discipline and repetition.

I want you to pick up this same type of habit with all those trouble hands you’re dealt in EP. I also want you to pick up the habit of opening up your game when you in LP. And I want to you to adjust in middle position and the blinds accordingly, too.

And the easiest way to begin doing this is with a set of starting hand charts. Every single time you play. For the next 66 sessions. Seriously.

The Charts

Over the next few installments of this series, I’m going to provide you with starting hand charts for early position (EP), middle position (MP), late position (LP), and the blinds. These are safe, conservative charts that my business partner, Le Monsieur, and I created last year as part of the development work we’re doing on a full-up poker training course.

We created these charts by analyzing of over three million hands of small and mid-stakes online poker data. These were hands that went to showdown and turned face-up. We also closely examined a few hundred thousand hands from my own poker database and compared and integrated the results with the 3M hands. We then applied an algorithm that determined relative hand strengths, as well as factored in things like how many players were left to act after you, the probability that at least one of these players were dealt a stronger hand than yours, and so on. We then set a minimum expected value (EV) threshold within this giant data set, et voilá, we had ourselves a sound, recommended starting hands, which was baed on real hard data, for each seat at a 9-handed table. We were then able to modify these charts for shorter-handed tables, like 6max and so on.

While I make no claim that these charts are perfect or will guarantee that you will win with them (there’s more to winning poker than just choosing the right starting hands, after all), I do believe the charts are pretty damn good. I used them myself for a couple months at stakes ranging from $5NL to $100NL as both a means to validate there effectiveness, as well as reinforce their habits into my own game. I also had a couple of my students use the charts in their own play during training sessions.

The result is I now believe that these are solid, safe charts to use in your own game.

Your Homework Assignment

Knowing all this, your homework assignment is use a set of starting hand charts over the next 66 or more sessions you play in. I would recommend you use the ones I’m going to provide in upcoming posts, but that’s entirely up to you. Use a different set provided by someone else– but make sure it’s based on real data or results, and not just something that the author “knows” is correct.

Poker Hand Odds Preflop Chart Template

Regardless of what charts you use, you actually need to use them. You need learn the habit of playing tighter up front, of folding trap hands in EP. You also need to learn the habit of loosening up in LP–but not too much. You need to learn the habit of discipline in your choice of starting hands. You need to literally use solid starting hand charts EVERY SINGLE TIME YOU PLAY for at least the next 66 sessions– until the habit of playing a correct foundational set of hands is hardwired into your brain and you play them on auto-pilot. Only then can you begin to open up and modify your game based on individual “it depends” situations.

It may be painful to use charts like this for this long, but I believe doing so will greatly improve your game. Religiously look at the charts before acting, each and every time you are dealt a new hand. Yes, you’ll memorize the charts quickly, but still look to be sure. Force yourself to follow the guidance of the charts. Don’t get tempted to deviate from them. Yes, there will be clear opportunities to deviate, and later when you’ve fully integrated these ABC hands into your play you can modify your play, but for now the goal is to build good foundational habits into your game.

Starting hand charts take one piece of the complexity pie away and replaces it with something safe and fundamental. They teach discipline. These kinds of charts force the player–you!–to employ position, whether the player–you!– understands its importance yet or not.

Said simply, starting hand charts are a good thing.

Summing Up

A starting hand chart isn’t the end-all, be-all of preflop hand selection, but it will get make the practice of playing tight up front a habit. If I had a nickel for every time I saw a player get stacked because they opened a shiny-bright hand like QJ suited or ATo under-the-gun, I’d be a rich man today. Quite literally as I was writing the first draft of this post, I received an email from a struggling player who complained of losing a deep stack in a cash game because they opened KJo in EP, were re-raised by someone in LP, called this raise, checked-called on a K-x-x flop, and then got married to their top pair right through an expensive river. This player check-called their entire stack away in a situation where they never should have seen a flop in the first place. If they’d made a habit of using a proper starting hand chart, they wouldn’t have been in that situation in the first place, and their stack would still be theirs, and sitting in front of the villain.

Beginners benefit the most from starting hand charts, but sometimes old hands need them too to fix their game. Sometimes you have to go back to the basics. I recommend that even if you’ve played poker for years that you take the time to review your starting hand selection. Use a chart and force yourself for some sessions to retool your game back to a basic, conservative starting point. Sometimes it’s harder to break bad habits than it is to learn new ones, so this may take a while, and it may be painful– but I still recommend it.

After you’ve made sound starting hand selection an auto-piloted habit in your game, and you begin progress in your skills and abilities, then you can begin to deviate from the charts. You can use the recommendations in the charts as a baseline starting point that you stray from as the circumstances call for. You can tighten or loosen up depending upon the table dynamics, players, reads, meta game, and so on…

…but until you have truly made it a habit to choose solid starting hands, you need to stick to the basics. At least for the next 66 sessions, that is.

~End~

*As you progress in your skills, you may occasionally make a different play with Aces in EP (like slow-playing or limp-reraising them), but those instances are very rare, and beginners should not even think about trying them until they master more basic skills and plays.

**Actually, 7-2 offsuit isn’t necessarily the “worst” starting hand in poker. In some situations, for example, 3-2 offsuit is actually worse. See, in poker “it always depends.”

Related Posts:

Learn. Master. Crush.

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Poker Hands Odds Preflop

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