Poker School - Lesson 2 | Starting Hands

In this installment of Poker School, we'll be starting off with some table selection, look at starting hands (chart included) and see how our position affects our preflop decisions.

Table Selection

When you're playing poker with the intention of winning money, you want to play against as bad opponents as possible. This is where many aspiring players have lots of work to do, as after they've learned some basic rules about starting hands and pot odds, they just want to sit down and play but don't take the time to evaluate the tables available. When you're checking out the tables, you want to find the easy ones filled with bad players ("fish"), and avoid the ones with lots of tight and aggressive players because there your winnings will be slim at best.

How can you find the tables with fish? Well, there's some characteristics that give away if the table is a good one or a bad one. First and foremost the most important stat you can find is the "average players on the flop" that some of the sites offer. As we'll see later, you should play a bit under 20% of your starting hands in a regular game, and if you see a table that has 50% of the players seeing the flop, you can make some assumptions about the looseness of the game in question. Other factors to look at when selecting tables are average size of the pot (bigger is usually better, but not always), preflop raise percentage (low raise percentage means passive play, which is good for us), and also if you can identify some of the players in the game to be either tough or easy prey. The reason why tables with huge average pots can sometimes not be optimal ones to play in is that huge pots usually derive from aggressive play of some of the players, and we don't want those aggressive players in our game unless we know how to handle them.