Which Hands, What Opening Range in Poker?

Your opening range in poker, the hands you choose to open with, depends on the situation such as position. In early position like UTG, only open with strong hands and widen your range as you approach the button, opening up to 50% of hands.

Mastering Opening Ranges: A Necessary Foundation

The hands you choose to open with in poker will impact your entire game. At first, it's not obvious which hands you should play and which you shouldn't. Poker Toolkit offers a set of ranges that can serve as a foundation to improve your game.

The Risk of Not Studying Opening Ranges in Poker

If you don't work on your playing technique, you'll question yourself too much with each hand and make easily avoidable mistakes.

What Does Opening Mean in Poker?

During the first preflop betting round, the first player who voluntarily enters the pot will "open". This means they're opening the action.

If they raise more than the required blind, it's an "open raise".
If they only call the blind, it's an "open call".

When an opponent has already voluntarily entered the pot, we no longer talk about opening but only about calling, raising, or folding.

Why Define Your Preflop Strategy by Selecting Starting Hands and Working on Opening Ranges?

It's important to define a preflop strategy by selecting your starting hand range and working on opening ranges for several reasons.

It allows for a coherent and well-thought-out approach to preflop play, which can help avoid common mistakes such as playing too many marginal hands or not playing enough hands and sufficiently aggressively.

How to Evaluate Each Hand in a Poker Opening Range?

Working on your opening ranges will require analyzing existing hands and asking yourself for each one:

• Is the hand naturally strong like AA or weak like 72o?
  Some hands (like 98s or 33, KTo) will be more complicated to judge and their strength will depend on the table situation.

• What are you trying to accomplish with the hand?

  • Looking for a draw to hit and win very large pots at low frequency with hands like T9s.

  • Getting to showdown when hitting a top pair without trying to build a big pot with hands like K9o when defending blinds from the Big Blind.

  • Looking to get opponents all-in preflop to maximize value with hands like AA, KK, QQ.

  • Not playing hands that are too weak to avoid losing more chips like 83o or T4o.

• Anticipate for each hand what you'll do if an opponent re-raises after your open. Whether you have position on the opponent or are out of position will impact your reaction to the 3bet.

When you've answered each of these questions for the different possible hands, you have a better understanding of hand strengths and reasons to play or not play them.

Adapting Opening Ranges Based on Overall Game Situation: Stacks, Positions, ICM, Opponent Profiles...

Your hand strength isn't sufficient information to know if you should open it. The entire hand context will impact your choice:

• When you have to act first in betting rounds (in the blinds and early position), you have less information and must therefore select stronger hands to play
  It's easier to play when you're in last position on the Button, Cut off or Hi jack, so you have the ability to play weaker hands.

• In MTTs, the sizes of different stacks at the table will have a significant impact on which hands to open. The deeper your stack compared to other participants, the more pressure you apply to other players, allowing you to open more hands preflop. (Be careful of opponents with short stacks under 10 blinds who might re-raise all-in)

• In tournament situations like the bubble, your overall tournament situation will force you to be either more aggressive by playing more hands or extremely passive by playing almost no hands.

• Based on your opponents' profiles, your opening ranges will evolve.
  Against passive opponents who easily fold, you can open many hands.
  Against aggressive opponents who often re-raise and for large amounts, you'll need to play only strong hands to withstand the raises.

Having a well-defined preflop strategy can facilitate your post-flop decision-making, giving you a solid foundation as a beginning player to determine which actions to take based on community cards and opponent actions.

Opening Percentages Based on Position in Poker

Opening ranges in poker can be tighter or looser. For a beginning player, for example, it might be beneficial to start with ranges containing fewer marginal hands to avoid mistakes during hand play.

Here's a guide on the percentage of hands to play based on position for a beginning player wanting to avoid mistakes:

• Low Jack: approximately 13% of hands should be opened.

• Hi Jack: approximately 22% of hands should be opened.

• Cut off: approximately 32% of hands should be opened.

• Button: approximately 44% of hands should be opened.

• Small blind: approximately 32% of hands should be opened.

Tools for Working on Ranges

Many tools allow you to work on your poker opening ranges. Poker Toolkit offers a simple and intuitive range editor plus a set of basic ranges to adapt for beginning poker players.

The Risk of Getting Re-raised When Opening

When selecting hands to open preflop, it's important to anticipate the risk of getting re-raised (3bet) by an opponent. In case of a re-raise, a new decision must be made and anticipating it will once again limit mistakes.

This means considering whether you'll fold, call, or re-raise based on the hand, the opponent, and the overall game situation.