The following is a general guide to which hands you should be playing pre-flop and how to play them, however you can add some extra hands if you are in late position (one of the last to act) and you can take some hands away if there has been a raise and a re-raise before you.

If you are in early or middle position and nobody has raised you should raise with this standard range of hands:

AA KK QQ JJ TT 99 88 77 66 55 AK AQ AJ

If you are in late position and nobody has raised before you, you can also play these hands:

44 33 22 AT KQ

If there has been a raise and a re-raise before you, you should only play these hands:

Re-re-raise with: AA KK QQ Call with: AK

If there has just been a raise ahead of you, you should play these hands:

Re-raise with: AA KK QQ JJ AK Call with: TT 99 88 77 66 55

It may be tempting to play weaker hands, especially if you aren’t getting dealt many good cards but learning how to be patient in poker and fold those weaker hands will make you much more successful.

There are many different factors that determine what hands you should play in poker and how to play them including what type of opponents you are playing, how deep stacked you are (how many big blinds worth you have) and how many players are at the table. We will go into these extra factors and more later on but for now if you stick to the above guide you will be in good shape, especially against poor players.

Beginners Poker Strategy - Starting Hands Pre Flop Strategy Guide. Learn this proven winning poker strategy that will stop you losing money and get you making a profit fast.

Most Common Mistakes Made By Losing Players

1) Playing weak aces.

Often players will make or call pre-flop raises with hands like A7 or worse and find themselves against a stronger ace like AK or AQ. So if the flop is something like A9J they will lose a big pot because they see they have top pair and assume they have the best hand when in fact they are way behind. Avoid this pitfall by not calling pre-flop raises with hands like AT or worse. Ideally you want to be calling or re-raising with AK.

2) Calling too much on a draw.

Losing players (or fish) tend to call bets that are far too big in the hope they might just hit one of their outs. It’s ok to call bets on a draw if you are getting the correct odds to call but say if your calling $100 to win a maximum of $200 you need at least a 33% chance of winning the hand. If for example there are 4 cards in the deck that will give you the winning hand (outs) and there are still two cards to be dealt you only have a roughly 16% chance to win so you should fold. You can roughly work out your odds of making your hand by multiplying your outs by two then multiplying that by the amount of cards still to be dealt (2 on the flop, 1 on the turn) so here it would be 4x2=8 then 8x2=16.