Off the Chart – Expanding our Starting Hands

You've played some, used the starting hand chart, and have a pretty good idea what hands you should be playing from which positions. That's a nice start. But it's only a start. You already know that starting hand selection is one of keys to winning poker, but now it's time to look at the other factors that go into starting hand selection which go far beyond the starting hand chart.

When you get dealt your hand and think about what to so pre-flop, you should consider:

• The Starting Hand Chart (SHC) and its limitations
• Your position
• Stack sizes
• Open-raise sizing
• Limpers and extra posters
• Some sort of edge or read of the table

Let's take a look at each of these a little more in-depth.

The Starting Hand Chart and its Limitations

The SHC is a nice guide – not the Bible.

We've previously recommended that as a beginner player, you should absolutely use a starting hand chart to help you determine which cards to play, and when. And when you are a beginner, it is something you should absolutely do and try to follow.

But now you've played a few hands, and it's time to let you in on a little secret: The starting hand chart has some serious limitations and flaws, and should only be used as a rough guide. You have probably realized by now that poker is not like blackjack, where the same strategy is the right play every single time. No, poker is fluid and changes constantly based on your opponents, and that you have to constantly adjust and change to the game. Staying within the confines of the SHC will banish you to being a break-even player, at best, and prevent you from thinking differently, which is how poker is won.

So, let's continue to use our SHC as a guide (for this article, let's say that we have a TAG-specific SHC) and see how some of the other factors listed above can cause us to move away from the suggestions on it.

Your Position

Many starting hand charts do somewhat take position into account, but in a very blunt way. There are hands like A8o which are pretty much always to be played from the button, yet thrown away UTG, and most SHCs do allow for this.

However, you should not only consider your position at the table, but also where you are relative to other players and their playing styles. If you have a very aggressive players to your left you may have to play a bit tighter, no matter what position you are in (except BU). Likewise, a bunch of fish in front of you mean that you can play a little looser, even from UTG or middle positions. Your position relative to your opponents can have a huge effect on your play in general.

Stack Sizes

Stack sizes can also be a huge factor in determining opening ranges, yet are never taken into account in any SHC we've ever seen. Yours and your opponents' stack sizes can really help us out because we can use them to calculate both our implied odds and our reverse implied odds for that hand.

Opening Wider With Good Implied Odds

Hands such as 78ss, J9ss, or small pocket pairs like 66 or lower are hands which become far more attractive to play when your opponents have larger stacks. The reason for this is because these are the kinds of hands that don't often get made, but when they do, they usually make the nuts or second nuts and can win a lot of money. When that happens, you want your opponents to have enough money that you can take from them to make up for the other times that this hand does not hit anything. If your opponent has a big stack, it could be profitable to play these at times when the SHC says not to, because you can get a huge payout which exceeds the losses over the long term.

Tightening Up With Bad Reverse Implied Odds

JJ, QQ, or AKo are good starting hands from almost every position, most of the time. However, these hands can really suffer when your opponent has a deep stack because the hands that you are hoping for are very good for showdown pre-flop, but can become far less valuable as the hand goes on. What this means is that an opponent who is more than happy to call for 100bb probably has something extremely strong as well, or if we have already gotten post-flop, has it something higher than QQ. However, opponents who only have 20bb will call no matter what. Be a bit more cautious with hands like these than you normally would if a deep-stacked player seems to have no problem stacking off against you.

The Middle Range

Then there are the others which could be played both ways depending on your opponents stack size. These are hands like QTs or KQo which act like 78ss against an opponent with deep stacks, while if the opponent is short-stacked, you can play them for normal value.

General Rule for Stack Sizes

The basic rule is that if there are still short-stacked players behind you; tighten up range and your open-raises. The deeper the stacks are of the players behind you, the looser and looser you can open up your range and play a lot more of the speculative hands that benefit from implied odds. In this case, you should also be a little more concerned about playing those hands which would give you TPTK (Top pair, top kicker) as your opponents now have better implied odds on you. Going all-in preflop with something like AKo or even KK seems like less and less a good idea if you are playing 200bb, as you are really suffering from reverse implied odds, and might want to back off instead.

Sizing of Open-Raises

Many players tend to stick to similar patterns for open-raise sizes from different positions. UTG might raise 4-5bb, which BU would only raise 2.5bb. While this is a good guideline, you should also consider varying your open-raises, and also consider altering your play when you see your opponents deviating from their standard open-raises.

If you are constantly open-raising 4bb from UTG and there is one opponent who consistently 3bets you into submission every time, it's probably a good idea to lower your raise amount, so you stop losing so much. On the other hand, you are playing a gigantic fish who calls everything pre-flop. Why not raise as much as you can get away with when you have a strong hand? He might catch you once in a blue moon, but you should try to take him for all he's worth.

Also paying attention to your opponent's open-raises can affect what you want to play. For instance, an aggressive player normally open-raises 3bb from the button, but suddenly he only raises 1.5bb. You might want to tighten up, as very often inexperienced players will get a monster like AA, and lower their bets to induce more callers. And if you have a tight player suddenly light up with a 9bb open-raise, you can probably be certain that they got dealt something huge and your 33 probably won't be a good call.

Limpers and Extra Posters

When you get a fish who limps into the hand and you have position on him, you can widen your starting hand range a bit and iso-raise when you might not have necessarily open-raised the hand. But in this case, you know how much of a fish the player is, and you want to get the other players to fold so that you can be heads-up against the fish, where your marginal hand might have a lot more expected value.

Additionally, when there is a case where another player has posted a blind besides the SB and BB, there is some extra money already in the hand, while the probability that player will have good cards is already quite low. This means you can choose to raise with a larger range of hands, hoping that you can steal the pot and grab that extra dead money. It's especially a good idea if they are in front of you and have already checked, they don't have anything good enough to raise with.

Edge and Reading

You should also consider what kind of skill or informational edge you might have over your opponents, and vice-versa. The more you know about your opponents, and the more confident you are of their (inferior) abilities the larger range you can open with in your effort to exploit them.

Conversely, when you are at a tough table, and everyone is playing smart and well, with hundreds of thousands of hours at the table already behind them, marginal hands such as A5o become easy hands to throw away from earlier position, as you know that these opponents will just cream you if you try to play them.

Other pieces of information can help you as well, as you play and read your opponents more. As CO, you may see that BU will constantly 3bet with marginal hands, and you know that it is pointless to raise with anything that's not super-strong, even from that decent position. Or you can open-raise with the plan to 4bet bluff him. When you can plan your strategy that far ahead, the better you can determine which hands to play with, and the better player you become.

Conclusion

The SHC is a great place to start, and certainly shouldn't be tossed in the garbage as soon as you've played a few dozen hours of poker. You should keep it around, but know when it's a good idea to ignore what is has to say.

As we noted earlier, one of the most important aspects for determining strategy and opening hand ranges is the stack sizes. Generally, the deeper the stacks, the less and less useful the SHC is. At 1,000bb stacks, it's little more than colored squares. With stacks at a more normal size, like 100bb, it carries a little more weight, but you also need to consider the other factors listed above as well.

Your goal should not only be to memorize and internalize the SHC, but to go beyond it and start to automatically consider all the other factors before you make any sort of pre-flop move. Try to think about these things more and more, and after some time you should be able to decide which hands to play based on position, stack sizes, and your opponents in a split-second, without thinking about it.