Playing Tight Aggressive – Preflop Hand Selection

Now we have thought about how position changes the decisions we make at the poker table, we now get to see exactly how it applies to our strategy. The table below illustrates what we should do with each hand in a situation where we have no special information about our opponents.

This guide is what you should be referring to when starting out playing online poker.

In the table below, for simplicity’s sake, positions are split up into four categories (rather than the actual nine). The Early Position column refers to positions Under the Gun (UTG), and UTG+1. The Middle Position column refers to Middle Position 1 (MP1), MP2, and the Hijack (HJ). The Late Position column covers the Cutoff (CO) and the Button (BU). The Blinds column, obviously, covers the Small Blind (SB) and Big Blind (BB). If you find yourself playing on a table with less than nine players, you should drop an early position seat for each player that is missing.

Call20

When thinking about whether to call pocket pairs when facing a raise, we need to think about our opponents chip stack. When we have a pocket pair, we hit trips (or a set) on the flop about 12% of the time, but when we do we can often get a big payout from it. We need to make sure our opponent has enough money to pay us off when we do hit, so the term Call20 means that we should only call a raise if our opponent has at least 20 times the amount of their raise in their chip stack. For example, if our opponent raises to three BB preflop and we hold 88, we should only call the raise if our opponent has 90BB in his stack.