Preflop Fundamentals

A lot of beginning and recreational poker players make the same set of fundamental errors that stem from poor preflop hand selection. They usually play way too many hands than they should be, and they play them passively. They limp in with marginal to weak hands hoping to see a cheap flop only to get raised by some aggressive player. Now they have to decide whether or not they want to continue with this weak hand in a raised pot out of position against an aggressive player or just muck it now. Sound familiar? Both choices actually suck. Why bother limping in at all if you're just going to fold when somebody announces they have a good hand? Chances are when 9 players are seated at a table somebody has something worth raising. Then again calling the raise is usually pretty bad too. Sure you'll get lucky and flop two pair, trips or catch that flush or straight every now and again but are all those preflop calls worth it for the occasional big hand? Certainly not, especially if you don't get paid off when you finally hit that flush. These mistakes are often compounded on later streets in the hand and the situation just gets worse as the pot gets bigger.



If the mistakes that I've mentioned in the above paragraph sound similar to yourself, don't worry because the vast majority of microstakes players fall into this category. Most only know what they've seen on television or from chatting with friends. There are some decent books out there but a lot of the material on no limit cash games is written by somebody who is a high stakes professional, and a lot of it isn't all that applicable to beating the microstakes.

So how do you beat the microstakes then?

I'm not going to lie and say that it's very simple as we've got a lot of important concepts to cover, but hopefully after this first article will have you well on your way to getting there. The first step, if you haven't figured it out already is stop playing so loose-passive preflop and switch to a tight-aggressive strategy. To do this we really have to narrow down the range of hands that we're going to play, and when we do play a hand we're going to raise it up. Remember, if your hand is good enough to call with, then it is good enough to raise, because it gives us two ways to win the pot, either by folding everyone out or showing down the best hand. Since we're only playing good starting hands, we will on average have a better hand than our opponents after the flop so we want to raise our good hands for value and start building a pot from the get go. It makes it a lot easier to get somebody to commit their entire stack by the river if we go to the flop with the pot already 5x larger than we would have had we not raised preflop.

So what hands should we be playing preflop?

I recently got my girlfriend turned on to poker. Prior to being with me she literally knew nothing about poker other than it is a card game played for money. I started by teaching her the rules and mechanics of the game. I then gave her a very tight list of hands to play to get her feet wet at the play money tables on pokerstars. That list included all pocket pairs, AK and AQ. This is an extremely tight strategy but believe it or she is crushing the play money games even though her understanding of the game is still very limited. Playing this tight does cause you to pass up on a lot of great opportunities to make some money as you'll be folding a lot of good hands but it does also keep you out of a lot of marginal situations, which will turn into losing situations if your postflop game is still undevloped. This strategy also capitalizes on the biggest mistake most microstakes players make - calling too much. As you move up in levels, playing this tight will become less and less profitable so we're going to have to mix in some other hands.

In early position it is a good idea to stick to the list of hands I just gave. In middle position you can start playing hands like AJo, KQo, A9s+, and suited connectors 9Ts and higher. In late position you you can open up your range a lot though it is a good idea to mix more hands gradually and see how you perform with them over the long run. I'm going to write a article in the near future on blind stealing becomes more and more important as you move up but for now I'm going to keep things simple.

So I've picked up a strong hand, how much do I raise to?

The general rule of thumb amongst winning online microstakes players is 4bb + 1 for each limper. In plain english this means 4big blinds plus 1 big blind for each player that has limped in(called the big blind). By doing this, you effectively make about a pot sized raise each time you enter the pot.

Somebody has already raised before it got to me, what do I do now?

Well if you don't have a good hand then the answer should be to fold. You definitely want to be reraising premium hands such as AK, QQ, KK, and AA. A standard reraise should be about 3 times the initial raise amount. If there is a cold caller between you and the raiser then you should make it 4 times. The purpose of this is to deny anybody the implied odds they need to justify calling with a weak hand. That doesn't mean that they still won't call your reraise but you will have induced a mistake on their part if they do. It's important to remember that this is only a general guide. As you progress as a player, you'll find profitable spots to reraise much weaker hands and even total junk. There will also be situations where the original raiser is so tight that reraising QQ against them can be bad since they may only ever raise with AA and KK. This sort of player is rare but they are out there, so know thy enemies and use your discretion.

With most other pocket pairs you want to call hoping to flop a set. This practice is commonly referred to as setmining. Somebody raises preflop and you call with 55. About 12% of the time you will hit your set on the flop and you're hoping to win your opponents stack if you do. I'll talk more about this in later articles but just remember that in order to setmine profitably at the micros, the amount of the preflop raise should not exceed 10% of the effective stack size(even though you have 100bb in your stack if the preflop raiser only has 60bb, then effective stack sizes are 60bb as this is the most you can win). Aside from big pairs, flopping sets will be where most of your winnings should come from.

Ok so I've raised preflop and got a caller. What now?

Generally, after raising preflop you should make a continuation bet even if you miss the flop. Optimal size is usually 2/3 - 3/4 of the pot. You'll find that it works fairly frequently so heads up you should be cbetting about 75% of the time. It will work most often against players who play fit or fold on the flop and less often on players that call too much with weak hands. Against these players lean more towards checking and folding to pressure if you've missed and just bet strong made hands and draws on the flop. In multiway pots you also want to be cbetting less often and will probably be best off in the beginning sticking to cbetting only when you hit the flop. There is a lot to know about continuation betting and I plan on dedicating an entire article on it in the future but for now, use your hand strength, the texture of the flop, and your opponents tendencies to help you decide whether or not to fire a cbet.

Well thanks for reading this first article, I hope that you were able to learn something from it. If you are already a fairly knowledgeable player then I apologize for not having more advanced content but worry not, I plan on dedicating future articles to specific, more advanced concepts in the very near future.