How to select your hands preflop at Limit Holdem.

Starting Hands for Limit Holdem

As said in The Fold article, begin able to carefully pick the battles you are going to fight is always of paramount importance in poker. Your pocket cards are on the top of the criteria, since they enable you to know how the hand is likely to evolve for you. Selecting your hand is selecting the situations you will play on the later streets, and you only want to play the profitable ones. This is called playing tight.

Many casual and not-so-casual players play too many hands, and lose money with all the non-profitable situations they end up playing because of their loose standards. Yet, once in a while, a loose player will rake up a monster pot with some total junk, and this brings about many questions to the tight player. Isn’t the extra deception worth a few bucks, or a few headaches in difficult situations?

Let’s give it straight to you: no, it isn’t worth it. Not at limit poker anyway. You will simply lose your preflop bets most of the time, lose even more when you hit a little something that is not the best hand, and lose even more yet when you hit something decent that doesn’t hold up to the showdown. This is way too much for the rare cases when you will win a good pot, let alone that you can hit your miraculous flop and nobody calls you. Even if someone plays when you hit big, you will just win that many fixed bets, not enough to make up for all the previous losses. Just do not play trash hands, like 72 or 83. In fact, do not play anything unless it has several things going for it. We are going to see what these “things” are.

The Criteria

The following criteria should be considered when deciding whether to play a hand:

• what hands you are likely to be up against, given the action up to you;
• what hand you are likely to build;
• how many opponents will be in the hand;
• what position you have;
• the style of your opponents (loose/tight, passive/aggressive, like to see a flop etc.);
• your image at this point.

Several criteria have an impact on each other; for instance, the range of hands an opponent can have depends on his position and his style, the likely number of opponents depends on the action, and so on.

What You Build

There are five main groups of hands you are going to build with your starting hand:

• overpairs, with high pairs like queens or better;
• pairs, with hands like AK, K9 or 83;
• flush draws, with suited aces and suited connectors;
• straight draws, with connectors, suited or not;
• sets, with any pairs;

Some of these hands play better against few opponents, like high pairs. Against six opponents, a single pair is probably not going to be the best hand, so you want to narrow the field with these hands.

Some others want a multiway pot to get the odds to draw, and win extra bets when they complete it. These are the straight and flush draws; playing connectors is the easiest way to get one. Small pairs want a multiway pot too, since they most likely won’t win if they don’t hit their set.

Mid pairs are somewhat in-between, since they can win on their own, but can fall back on hitting a set if there are many callers.

Trash hands build a poor pair with dubious kicker, or weak flush draws.That’s why playing any hand is losing poker. Regarding the “weak” flush draw, it is better than nothing, and sometimes better than that of small suited connectors, but for the latter the flush draw is mainly an escape hatch, while the trash hand has almost nothing else to show, so this is not an emergency exit but almost its only hope from the word go.

It is therefore important to know what you build, and to make sure the situation is right to build such a hand.

Importance of Position

It is easier to break down the different situations according to the position, that is, how many players have acted before you, how many will act after you, what they have done and what are they likely to do.

If this sounds like a minor advantage to you, reconsider your opinion, because position is extremely important. The answer to most poker questions and problems is “it depends”. It depends on extra information, and you can get a piece of this information by having a good position, since you will know what the players before you did, and how many are left after you.

Take a hand like 67. If you limp with it first to act on a full table, many things can happen. The pot can be raised and reraised. You can even play it heads-up. There are many terrible scenarios for your connector. If you play it without knowing that the situatin will be right for it, you will often lose money, and most often to the point of making playing the hand plain unprofitable.

Say you are fencing in some amateur competition against ten consecutive opponents, and you can choose your weapon (saber, epee or foil). If your opponents fence before you, you will have the opportunity to choose the best weapon for you against this opponent. This information can make the difference between losing and winning. Only if you are quite skilled with either weapon don’t you mind fencing first. This is the same in poker: you play from early position when you are strong enough.