One of the best ways to improving your game is to make adjustments to your pre flop play. You want to be folding a lot pre flop. In other words you don’t want to be involved in as many hands. The main benefit of tightening up your pre flop play is that you won’t be involved in as many tricky spots. If you really like to play poker this can be really difficult because you want to always be involved in the action, but you need discipline with your pre flop play if you want to consistently have winning sessions.

What starting hands you should open with has a lot to do with your position. You should only be opening with a raise in early position with very strong hands because you don’t have position. Another important factor is how many other players are at the table. How you play early position is very different if you are playing at a full ring 9-player table as opposed to a 6-max ring game. On a full ring table if you open with a raise UTG, you potentially have 8 other players who could call or even re-raise you. Where’s opening with a raise at a 6-max table, you have much fewer players to worry about.

In addition to having good table selection where you want to find tables where there are weak players, the other single most important factor for a winning poker player is to play well pre flop. The problem most beginners make is they get involved in too many pots with mediocre hands because they raise with a wide range of hands. Most players will not play well before the flop so you want to exploit this. They will want to see a flop with any 2 cards so you want to try and exploit this weakness by trying to get them heads up when you have position on them. This pre flop strategy is pretty easy to explain but psychologically it can take a lot of discipline if you want to master it.

Most poker books will have a chapter that discusses pre flop play and what are good starting hands. As a general rule of thumb, in early position you want to open with a raise with 10-10+, A-10+ and possibly a few other hand ranges. Your starting hand range is also dependant on your opponents. If they are calling stations and involved in many pots, you want to try and narrow your starting hand range to exploit their weakness, as already mentioned above. Medium pocket pairs and suited connectors can also be good hands to open with in early position, but there usually better cards to play in multi-way pots in late position.