Playing before the flop is your first opportunity to voluntarily put money in the pot. Don’t just toss in the first single bet to be a part of the action. Make good decisions by following the advice given in this lesson and stick to our recommended starting hand requirements until you gain more experience. There is no shame in folding and waiting for a better hand to play. On the contrary, the shame is in falling prey to the donkey’s mantra of “any two will do!”

1. No Limit Texas Holdem Preflop Strategy Game
2. No Limit Texas Holdem Preflop Strategy Rules
3. No Limit Texas Holdem Preflop Strategy Poker
4. No Limit Texas Holdem Preflop Strategy Cheat

• Recently I was playing $1/$2 Limit Texas Hold'em online and I noticed something striking about one of the players at my table. You think about your pre-flop strategy, but while you may need to.
• A lot of limit hold’em players will limp in pre-flop rather than raise. If you’re in a passive game and have a hand like J-Ts then you might want to limp because you’re looking to get as many people into the pot with you as possible in anticipation of flopping a big hand like a straight or flush—and making money from a large number of.
• If you choose to pass on more hands preflop and play better hands in more favorable position than your opponents, you give yourself a statistical advantage that translates into more profitable situations. It's just that simple. You win at limit texas hold'em in hand selection. Watching out for yourself in poker.

Before we mention starting hand requirements, let’s talk about the mindset that captures successful limit play. That mindset is the ability to be patient and selective about the hands you play. Patience is a critical element to winning hold’em play. Good players exercise the patience to wait for hands that they know have positive expectation and then play them aggressively. In a nutshell this strategy describes the selective, aggressive mantra that has been espoused by Krieger, Sklansky, Malmuth, Caro, and every other credible limit hold’em pundit of the last several decades.

In this article we will focus on the basic preflop strategy for 6-max Limit Hold'em. In later articles we will move on to playing after the flop. This article will concentrate on a couple of common preflop situations; what to do when everyone in front of you folds, hot to play against a raise and how to play on the button. Preflop Texas Holdem Strategy. Your preflop poker strategy forms the foundation of your game. Your first decisions will be made preflop during a hand, so it is important to get these decisions right. Thankfully this is one of the easier areas of the game to understand.

Tight is Right

The tight-aggressive approach is the backbone of a successful limit player’s strategy. The reason this approach is so successful is simple—the vast majority of the poker playing public are long term losers who do not have the discipline or knowledge to beat the game. Let your opponents make the mistake of playing too many hands while you become more selective. It will pay dividends. If you only play hands that figure to be the best against opponents who play too many mediocre hands, it just makes sense that you will win money. This critical skill is the foundation upon which other skills need to be added to make you a formidable limit hold’em player.

The most common mistake made by limit hold’em players is that they play too many hands. Look, no one enters a casino or logs on to an online game with the intention of folding hand after hand. But when you look at the entire universe of possible two-card starting hand combinations you might be dealt, the vast majority of them are junk, which means the correct play is to fold most of them. If there’s one tip that will raise your game significantly, it’s this: be selective with the hands you choose to play, and then be aggressive with the hands you do play.

Starting Hand Selection

What hands should you play if you’re going to be patient and selective? Well, that depends in large measure upon your position relative to the dealer button. The best starting hands are playable from any position, but other hands have very different characteristics.

We have created a starting hand chart that can be used as a guide. This chart will load as a PDF document (link opens in a new window), which you can view on screen or print off for easy reference.

Understand that our attempt to categorize starting hands by their strength and positional considerations is a loose guide. There are many factors that may encourage you to tighten or loosen your play from these guidelines. As in all poker decisions the phrase, “It depends” comes to mind. That is to say our starting hand chart is a guide, not a set of intractable rules.

In fact, you may want to look at a starting hand chart this way:

1. If you’re a beginner or a consistently money-losing player, treat this guide as the gospel.
2. If you’re an experienced player, you can treat these recommendations as a guide.
3. If you’re a skillful, winning player, please consider these recommendations a point of demarcation for your own creative, winning play.

But before you decide to deviate from these guidelines, have a reason for taking action that’s at variance from our recommendations.

We haven’t included every possible starting hand on our chart. Unplayable hands, also known as ‘junk’ don’t need any further explanation. I’m sure you will recognize them. In fact, the majority of the hands you’ll be dealt will fall into this category. Let your weak undisciplined opponents play 7-2 because it was suited—you throw them in the muck where they belong.

Type of Games

It’s important to be aware that different games play differently. The texture of the game—whether it’s tight and aggressive, tight and passive, loose and aggressive, loose and passive, or a mixture of these, will dictate what hands you should play. For example, if you’re playing in a loose and passive game, you can limp in from early position with small pocket pairs. If you’re playing in an aggressive game these hands are better off mucked from early position.

There is an old adage in poker relating to how tight or loose the game in which you’re in is being played. The adage advises to play tighter than the table. While this is obviously an over simplification it is generally true. While tight is certainly right, all you need do is play tighter poker than the table. The reason this will work is that through prudent hand selection coupled with your position you will be playing fewer (and generally better) hands than your opponents. However, expect loose games to tighten and tight games to become looser, and be ahead of that curve to ensure you’re in the most profitable zone at all times.

Calling vs. Raising

A lot of limit hold’em players will limp in pre-flop rather than raise. If you’re in a passive game and have a hand like J-Ts then you might want to limp because you’re looking to get as many people into the pot with you as possible in anticipation of flopping a big hand like a straight or flush—and making money from a large number of opponents. If you have a pair or high cards that can win without improving, such as A-K, you’re much better off raising and narrowing the field down to heads-up than you are by simply calling and inviting a number of players to enter the pot after you, one of whom might get lucky and steal the pot away from you.

If you call and are then raised, you’re going to call one more bet and see the flop. If it’s raised and re-raised, some players will do the same thing, regardless of the strength of their hand. Imagine entering the pot with the speculative hand of for a single bet from middle position. Now the player to your left raises, another player re-raises and yet another player makes it four bets, which is normally the cap in fixed limit. Weaker players will normally call as they have already invested a bet and the hand does have lots of potential. Stronger players would recognize the futility of throwing away three extra bets when it is apparent that they are way behind the competition. These distinctions will become clearer and clearer as your experience grows.

Cold Calling Raises

If the pot has been raised before it’s your turn, you must tighten up significantly and adjust for the position of the raise. Inexperienced limit hold’em players will frequently cold-call raises with mediocre and potentially dominated hands, such as A-J and K-J. These are costly errors. Be selective and avoid cold-calling raises with hands that have a slim chance to catch the cards they need to enable you to win the pot. Most good players, if they don’t have a very good hand, will simply throw their hand away and wait for a better opportunity. Remember that it takes a much better hand to call a raise than it does to make the initial raise yourself.

Always observe the pre-flop betting action in a limit hold’em game, because it provides valuable information about the strength of your opponent’s holdings. If there’s a bet and a raise and someone cold-calls, my first thought is “here’s a guy with A-Q who is terrified of a big pair and even more terrified of A-K”. He thinks A-Q is a pretty good hand and says to himself… “I’ll call and see what happens with it.” Of course it’s important that you assign a range of hands to your opponents, not just a specific hand. But most players will re-raise before the flop when they hold a premium hand and cold-calling a raise or cold-calling a re-raise is usually a sign of a hand that’s not in first place.

Conclusion

The question or whether to hold’em or fold’em is the first and most important decision you will make. If you’re new to limit hold’em then study our starting hand chart and follow the guidelines given in this lesson. Starting hand selection may differ slightly from pundit to pundit but these are a solid outline for a beginner to embrace. As your experience and knowledge of the game increases your starting requirements will vary based upon how tight or loose your table is, knowledge of the tendencies of players yet to act behind you, any betting that has occurred in front of you, and your current table image.

If you only play hands that figure to be the best against opponents who play too many mediocre hands, it just makes sense that you will win the money. Playing tight requires patience which many or even most recreational players just don’t exhibit. They are in the game to play, not sit to there and fold hand after hand and sit on the sidelines. This is the reason that most poker players are long term losers—they play too many hands. Sure they can get lucky playing junk on occasion and that is what keeps them coming back but their lack of patience and discipline is their financial undoing. If you truly seek success you must have the discipline to be patient.

By Tom 'TIME' Leonard

Tom has been writing about poker since 1994 and has played across the USA for over 40 years, playing every game in almost every card room in Atlantic City, California and Las Vegas.

Every poker player on the planet has been there before. You’ve been playing tight and grinding up a stack, patiently awaiting your opportunity to punish the table with pocket Aces – the best possible starting hand in no limit Texas holdem.

Even if you’re a decorated poker pro, finally looking down to find A-A in the hole is enough to cause goose bumps and immediate increase in your heartbeat.

After all, pocket Aces will always have any hand your opponent(s) potentially hold – except for another pair of Aces of course – completely and utterly dominated. All it takes now is a clean community card board to avoid the dreaded “bad beat” and you’re in the clear to claim a sizable stack of chips.

Unfortunately, navigating the flop, turn, and river to reach a showdown with pocket Aces still in the lead is easier said than done. no limit Texas holdem is a poker variant built on volatility and variance, so all it takes is the wrong runout to wreck your pocket Aces plan in a hurry.

The “Godfather of Poker” himself – 10-time World Series of Poker (WSOP) gold bracelet winning champion Doyle Brunson – knew this lesson well when he wrote his seminal strategy book “Super / System: A Course in Power Poker” in 1978. As Brunson put it way back then, holding pocket Aces is almost a recipe for either one of two likely outcomes:

“The fact is, with a pair of Aces … One of two things will usually happen.

Either (1) you’ll win a small pot, or (2) you’ll lose a big pot.”

For that reason, Brunson advised readers of his “Super / System” to take an aggressive approach before the flop whenever they’re lucky enough to squeeze that beautiful A-A. To his thinking, it’s far more favorable to drag a small pot when the alternative is losing your entire stack courtesy of a bad beat.

Whether you agree with Brunson’s advice is a matter of personal perception of course, and indeed, many players like to “slow play” their pocket Aces instead. Slow-playing simply refers to taking a passive line when holding a monster hand, so these folks will check and flat call rather than raise in hopes of trapping an unwitting opponent into overplaying a beaten hand.

Unfortunately, beginners who are taking up no limit Texas holdem for the first time are often inundated with unsolicited advice from more experienced players purporting to know the “right” way to play A-A. Spend enough time at a Las Vegas poker table, and you’ll invariably hear the regulars regale rookies with ironclad rules on the best way to deploy pocket aces:

“You should ALWAYS be raising the Ace-Ace kid, because when you’re up against two or three hands, you’re actually a favorite to lose by the river.”

“For my money, I’ll NEVER limp into the pot with pocket Aces, that’s a fool’s errand that paves the path to bad beat city.”

“The best players here learned long ago that the flushes and straights ALWAYS flop after you slow-play the Aces.”

Naturally, binary “this way or the highway” rules like this can never be effective within a fluid strategy game like no limit Texas holdem. The list of variables that should be taken into account before deciding on the correct course of action is a long one, including factors like stack sizing, table position, physical tells from an opponent, blind level (in the tournament setting), and one’s personal tolerance for risk.

Earlier on I decided to tackle one side of the most prevalent “rule” concerning pocket Aces, so I examined five reasons why you should always* raise preflop and play aggressively when holding A-A. To finish this thought experiment off, I’d like to shift the focus to the other side of the coin, so this page is devoted to five reasons why you should never* raise preflop when you have “American Airlines” in hand.

*Obviously, rules advising anyone to “never” or “always” adopt a certain strategy are defective by nature. no limit Texas holdem strategies should be flexible and fluid based on variables unique to that particular hand and situation. But the five reasons found below do explore reasons into why playing pocket Aces aggressively preflop is preferable to a slow-play approach.

1 – Odds of Getting Pocket Aces Are 1/220

With 52 cards in the deck, 13 unique ranks from 2 through Ace, and only two hole cards to a hand, your odds of catching pocket Aces stand at 1 in every 220 deals.

Those odds hold true for all pocket pairs for that matter, but if you’re hoping to land the best starting hand in the game, you can expect to do so roughly one-half of one percent of the time.

And remember, those are simply the theoretical odds based on long-term statistical probability…

In the real world setting, poker players can easily suffer through droughts lasting 300, 400, or even more hands without every setting eyes on pocket Aces.

With that in mind, you’ve got to ask yourself one thing – do you really want to waste such a rare opportunity by raising with reckless abandon?

Let’s say you’re playing in a $2/$5 no limit holdem cash game and you’re treading water up until you snag the Ace of hearts and the Ace of diamonds. Blessed with the prettiest hand in all of poker, and hoping to reap the rewards, you respond to an opponent’s $15 open by re-raising to a hefty $75.

This aggression sends the signal that you’re quite strong here, so the rest of the table folds around in short order. No bother though, you have your sights set solely on the original raiser’s $500 stack.

But when the action moves back to him, the opener simply smirks and says “nice hand, Aces, Kings, or Queens all have me beat so I’m out” before tossing pocket Jacks face up to the dealer. Just like that, a juicy spot in which you held A-A against a dominated J-J results in a middling $20 profit – and not the $500 uptick you were expecting to enjoy.

In a parallel poker universe, however, another version of you decided to simply flat call the first $15 raise. From there, the flop came down harmlessly showing 10-4-2, giving your opponent the impression he held the best hand with his over-pair to the board. A raising war ensues, and soon enough you have $1,000 in the pot with more than 91 percent equity thanks to your Aces beating their Jacks.

No Limit Texas Holdem Preflop Strategy Game

Unless you’re prepared to drag a series of tiny pots because your aggression folded potential second-best hands out preflop, limping in or flat calling opening raises is the best way to maximize your profit margin with pocket Aces.

2 – Play Passively to Disguise Your Pocket Aces

As the second example up above made clear, choosing to slow-play pocket Aces before the flop is a great way to trick your opponent(s) into thinking you have a marginal hand.

No Limit Texas Holdem Preflop Strategy Rules

After all, the “book” does say that optimal strategy involves raising to thin the herd when you hold a monster. Therefore, watching somebody put in the minimum amount of chips to proceed is usually a telltale sign that they’re speculating with suited connectors, small pocket pairs, or unpaired “Broadway” cards (10, Jack, Queen, King, or Ace).

Conversely, putting in a big raise or re-raising the opener helps opponents to narrow down your potential holdings to the premium starting hands.

Mixing it up by playing “in reverse” – or slow-playing your strong hands and going aggressive with weaker holdings – is part and parcel of higher-level poker strategy.

3 – “Aces-Cracking” Hands Are Still Huge Underdogs

Decades of poker experience has shown many regulars that the best way to topple pocket aces is to play suited connectors.

Forever, the poker community believed Jack-10 suited to be the best “Aces-cracker” in the game, thanks in large part to the abundance of flush and nut straight possibilities the hand provides. And indeed, J-10 suited does give your opponent a 21.55 percent chance to wind up with the winner at showdown.

Nonetheless, that means you’ll still win the pot roughly 4 times for every 5 confrontations between A-A and J-10 suited. A nearly 80 percent win rate is nothing to sneeze at, so you shouldn’t let the fear of losing once in five tries dissuade you from trapping draw-heavy hands like J-10 suited.

And the news is even better when you’re up against other playable hands like smaller pocket pairs (80.93 percent win rate) and Ace-King (91.95 percent). Knowing these numbers should help make slow-playing pocket Aces preflop much more palatable for risk-averse players.

Sure, you’ll suffer the occasional bad beat, but you’ll wind up with the winner much more often than not.

4 – Allow an Opponent Into the Hand

The case of “big slick,” or the Ace-King holding, is a perfect example to show why slow-playing pocket Aces really works.

If you let your opponent see a flop with A-K and they catch an Ace or a King, they’ll be absolutely delighted to have top-pair + top-kicker on their side. In almost every other case, flopping top-pair + top-kicker is a goldmine, as the A-K will be far out in front of weaker Aces and other dominated hands.

No Limit Texas Holdem Preflop Strategy Poker

By raising aggressively preflop, and sending a signal that their big slick might be up against “pocket rockets,” all you’re doing is scaring off a potential second-best hand that would’ve been happy to get their entire stack all in.

No Limit Texas Holdem Preflop Strategy Cheat

5 – Slow-Playing Aces Will Disorient Opponents

Once you’ve successfully employed a slow-play of pocket Aces, just look at your fellow player’s faces when you show down your cards.

They’ll be stunned and astonished… then they’ll be suspicious. Going forward, any hand you happen to limp in or flat call with could very well be a repeat, so they’ll be wary that you’re trying to trick them with A-A once again.

This hesitance on their part can provide a tremendous advantage for thinking players, as you’ll then be capable of exploiting their doubts by widening your own range of playable hands.

Any chance you get to disorient opponents at the poker table is extremely valuable, and slow-playing with pocket Aces is the ultimate form of subterfuge when playing real money Texas Holdem.

Conclusion

Pocket Aces can be a devilish hand to play simply based on the expectations you’ll have upon squeezing that perfect pair. Knowing you have the early advantage over the table can be intoxicating, but if you’re not careful, the A-A can cause you to play an overly cautious game. Choosing to always raise with the best starting hand in Texas holdem might have its merits, but so does taking the slow road and slow-playing pocket Aces to set yourself up for a massive pot.