Varying Your Hand Selection
Starting hand guides can be useful tools for players new to online poker. New players can benefit from such a tight structure effectively negating large losses and possibly even spinning out a small profit in micro-limit online play. Unfortunately, this isn’t necessarily the best way to make a considerable hourly rate, and in fact you may well blaze through your initial deposit waiting for the “ideal” occasion.
This is most applicable when playing no limit hold’em cash games. The dilemma with strictly using a opening hand guide is that you cannot appraise particular circumstances in a given hand before that hand actually happens. So you won’t find a hand like T3 off suit anywhere on any opening hand guide, but there may very well be scenarios where you need to play this hand in no-limit hold’em.
The primary difficulty following a strict tight method, is that you become the easiest player to read at the table. What happens when you are an effortless read? You start to lose pots because you get pushed off hands, strong players can more accurately determine your pocket cards, positional tactics can be used against you, resulting in your high-quality hands will not getting paid off the way you need them to, in order to be a profitable player.
For that reason, you need to open up your range of hands and possibly your position play as well. For illustration, you could raise with a hand like Jack-Nine suited from early position whenever you are dealt that hand. You could also call a lot more in late position with a wide range of hands, as long as it’s relatively inexpensive for you to see the flop. If you can control your entry costs for marginal hands and make positional plays against weak tight players you will have done all that you need to in order to create a puzzling profile of yourself.
And as a result you will produce for yourself the prospect to win the occasional massive hand which may well advance you to the final table, or create long-term positive EV for you in no limit poker tables. The bottom line is you can let everybody know you are using a starting hand guide, otherwise you might as well keep your cards face up.
