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Top 4 Tips for Playing Preflop

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Top 4 Tips for Playing Preflop

Preflop is arguably the most important street in poker. If you don't have solid preflop ranges and a strong knowledge of what those ranges are, then it becomes extraordinarily difficult to play a balanced strategy post-flop. The best poker players will know exactly what hands they'll raise from every position, as well as what they will do against raises from their opponents. While you may not be able to remember every single hand you'll raise from every position, we can give you some helpful tips to improve your pre-flop game.

Raise a tight range from Early Position

It might be boring, but one of the skills a good poker player needs is to have is the discipline to play tight when it's necessary. When you play from an Early Position, the more likely it is that a player left to act has a strong hand, due to the number of players there are who haven't acted yet. This means we have to be tight ourselves in anticipation of one of our opponents having a strong hand. While sometimes you might be able to get away with a light raise from Early Position, most of the time you're going to face resistance from one of your opponents. When this happens, you're likely going to be out of position for the post-flop betting streets. This is another reason why we play tighter from the Early Position as being out of position post-flop puts us at a disadvantage, so we need a stronger range to make up for it.

Limit your steal attempts to the Button and Cutoff

If you're looking to take the pot down pre-flop, your best chance of doing that comes from when you're on either the Button or in the Cutoff. This is because you only have 2-3 players left to act behind you which means it's less likely one of them will have a strong hand and they will all just fold. They are also going to be out of position against your post-flop so they will play tighter as a result of that. If you try to steal from the Middle/Early Position, you're more likely to face resistance and be forced to play post-flop with a weak hand against a strong range. These scenarios will lose you more money than you stand to win by stealing the blinds, so limit your stealing to when you're on the Button/in the Cutoff

Don't overvalue offsuit Broadways

These are considered "trap hands" by strong players as they're the kind of hand that looks a lot stronger than it is. Most recreational players will look down at a hand like QJo and think "Wow, two broadway cards, this is a strong hand! I'm always going to play this one!". However, this is a mistake as QJo is a hand that should only be played from certain positions. From Ealy Position, this hand becomes very weak as when we're called/3bet our opponent is far more likely to have AJ/AQ/KQ than they are to have JT/J9/QT - meaning that when we make our hand it's likely to be second best and will cost us a big pot. Save yourself the money and the post-flop headaches by folding it more often.

Play 3bet/Fold against raises in high rake environments

A lot of players prefer to call raises from their opponents rather than 3bet (re-raise) as it allows them to see the flop for cheaper and doesn't leave them open to being 4bet. While this is fine in tournaments, in cash games the rate of the rake should have a big impact on how you play. The higher the rake is on a poker site, the more you should play a 3bet or fold strategy against a raise (from every position other than the big blind) as you get to win the pot pre-flop more often and therefore get raked less often. While some sites will offer rakeback to their players to reward high volume play, the best sites to play online poker will have a low rake from the beginning, meaning you get to keep more of the pots you win. Be sure to check the rake structure of the stakes you play on different sites to see if you could be playing somewhere better. If the site you're playing on has a low rake for your stake level, the more profitable it is to call preflop raises.

Many players don't work on their preflop game as they consider it the least interesting of the three streets, but to be a good poker player you need to have a solid foundation upon which to build your strategy - that starts with fundamentally good preflop play.