Player's Stories

The Starting Hand Myth
By Steve Ruddock

Is playing quality starting hands the most important aspect to success in poker? I believe the answer depends on what form of poker you are playing. In this column I will attempt to prove how the game you are playing will change the importance of your starting hand, and how the blind or ante structure should affect your overall tightness.

Before I continue let me express that in no way do I feel starting hands are not important and I whole heartedly believe they should be chosen very wisely. That said I would like to add that I feel many players are misled in their starting hand requirements and don't take all factors into account when making their decisions but base them solely on charts..

Lets start out with a few statistics;

percentage of your hand seen

	Pre-flop Flop	4th street Turn	5th street
Texas Hold Em	28.5%	71.4%	85.7%
Omaha	44.5%	77.7%	88.8%
Seven Card Stud	43%	57%	71.4%

As you can see in Texas Hold Em your starting hand does not constitute a large portion of the total cards you will see, while in Omaha and 7 card Stud your starting hand is nearly half of your entire hand. Obviously your decisions before the flop in Omaha Hold Em and on 3rd street in Seven Card Stud are much more crucial than they are before the flop in Texas hold Em. With these simple statistics it becomes readily apparent that you can play many more marginal hands pre-flop in Texas Hold Em than in either Stud or Omaha.

Now look at those statistics one more time and see what happens on the flop and on 4th street. In Texas Hold Em you go from 28.5% of your hand all the way to 71.4%, a difference of almost 43%! In Stud the change is only 14% and in Omaha the difference is a little more than 33%. From these statistics you can clearly see that your hand in Texas Hold Em is not defined until the flop, while in Omaha you have a strong sense of your hands worth before the flop and it is also becomes clearly defined on the flop, and in Stud you will also have a strong sense of your hands worth on 3rd street but really won't know where you stand until 5th street. As you can see making good decisions on the flop can be more important than your decisions before the flop, and in stud a bad decision pre-flop will cost you on 2 betting rounds not just 1.

Earlier I mentioned that the blind and ante structure will also impact your starting hand requirements, now lets take a closer look at that.

Lets suppose you play $5/$10 Seven Card Stud with a $.50 ante, this means every 8 hands you will ante $4. Let's also assume that you will be the $2 bring in once every 8 hands as well. This gives us a total of $6 for every 8 hands or $.75 a hand. The proper strategy for this game would be to play extremely tight. If you were to play and win 1 hand out of 20 you would only need to win a pot in the$25 range to show a profit, pretty easily accomplished in a $5/$10 game. If our $5/$10 Stud game had a $1 ante it would be correct to loosen up since every pot will start with $10 instead of $6 and would cost you $1.25 a hand to play. Now that 1 hand in 20 that you play and win would need around $35-$40 for you to show a profit.

Now lets suppose you play $5/$10 Hold Em with a $5 big blind and a $2 small blind, while at another cardroom the blinds are $5 and $3, it would be correct to play tighter in the cardroom that has a $3 small blind since it will cost you $.80 a hand as compared to $.70 a hand in the other casino. You might say well it's only a dime how much of a difference can it make? Imagine if you play 25 hours of poker a week at a pace of about 30 hands an hour, over the course of a year that 10 cents a hand would add up to $3900! Not quite chump change for a $5/$10 player. A smart player will adjust his play not only to game conditions, loose-tight/passive-aggressive, but also to the blind structure.

Another example of using the blind structure to determine how tight or loose you will play is if there is a kill. At Foxwoods all of their $5/$10 limit games have a full kill at $100, what this means is that any time a pot is won by a single individual that is $100 or more the next hand will be played at the $10/$20 limit with the winner posting a $10 blind in addition to the normal $5 and $2 blinds. Now a savvy player will understand the potential in this type game, you can basically play $10/$20 poker for $5/$10 blinds! What does this do for our starting hand requirements? Very simply it tells us TIGHTEN UP!

Playing $10/$20 Texas Hold Em will cost you $15 every 10 hands in blinds, for a cost of $1.50 a hand. Now if you play in a $5/$10 kill game it will cost you only $.70 a hand to play. You can clearly see that you are getting a huge bargain when you play kill pots, and it is not unusual for a game like this to have 50% or more of the pots killed. Most of your opponents in this game will incorrectly loosen up on kill pots because they want to win a big one, or feel their pot odds have increased tremendously with the additional $10 blind,, when the correct strategy is to play even tighter.

Let's take a look at the difference in pot odds with a kill blind and on a normal betting round. I will assume 1 limper in addition to the blinds for each example and that the small blind folds each time and the big blind calls on the kill round.

In the $5/$10 round you would be receiving 2.4 to 1 odds on a call with 3 way action. During a kill round you receive 2.2 to 1 odds with 3 way action. Now does the theory that there are better pot odds because of the kill blind hold water? Absolutely not.

To use the blind or ante structure to determine how tight you should play you need only figure out how much it costs you to play a hand and compare that with the limit you are playing and the average size of the pots. The bigger the pots the less hands you will need to win to show a profit, the cheaper it is to play a hand the tighter you should play since you will need to win less to offset your blind and ante losses.

I hope this column has given you some new ideas on how to adjust your starting hands depending on the form of poker you are playing and how to determine under what game conditions they should be altered.