Quality meme.

Avi
Many people may be surprised to see that we recommend playing small pocket pairs
so often, particularly from early position and against a raise. A typical small
stakes game presents ideal conditions for these hands. Pairs thrive when they g
et lots of action if they flop a set. Since many of your opponents habitually pl
ay too many hands and go too far with them, your sets will tend to get plenty of
action. When you can be almost sure that at least one, if not several, of your
opponents will stay with you to the river, you can play any pair for one or two
bets. But if your game is tight, limit yourself to sevens or better from early p
osition. If it is frequently three or more bets before the flop, you might even
tighten up to nines or better. But in a typical, loose small stakes game, you sh
ould play the vast majority of your pocket pairs.
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You should cold-call a raise only rarely, especially if you are the first to do
so. For instance, we recommend cold-calling a raise in a tight game with only AQ
s, AJs, and KQs (also sometimes medium and small pocket pairs and suited connect
ors when three or more players have already entered the pot). Every other hand y
ou play against a raise you should usually reraise.
To give you an idea about how infrequently you should cold-call, you will be dea
lt one of these three suited hands once for every 110 hands you play. To cold-ca
ll, you cannot be in the blind or under the gun, and someone has to raise in fro
nt of you. All those conditions might occur twenty percent of the time. That wil
l leave you in a cold-calling situation once in every 550 hands. If you play liv
e, you might get 35 hands per hour. Thus, one of these cold-calling situations m
ight arise once every 15 hours or so.
Even if you add the calls with small pocket pairs and suited connectors and the
extra calls you can make when your game is very loose, you still probably should
not cold-call a raise more often than once every three hours. If you find that
you cold-call as little as three or four times per session (on average), you are
cold-calling too much. Either you are playing too many hands against a raise (a
devastating error), or you are playing too passively with your premium hands (n
ot as devastating, but an error nonetheless).
One of the first things you should watch for when you first sit in a game is the
cold-calling frequency. You will find many players who cold-call ten, twenty, o
r even fifty times per session. No strategy that performs even marginally well i
ncludes so much cold-calling. These players are simply hemorrhaging money. Seek
them out, but do not emulate them.
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If the pot has been raised and reraised in front of you, you must play extremely
tightly, even if you do not respect the raisers. Against typical opponents play
only AA-QQ and AKs. You may add JJ-TT and AK against loose raisers. If more tha
n about thirty percent of all hands are raised and reraised before the flop (ind
icating that the raises and reraises are very loose), you may also play 99, AQsATs, KQs-KJs, and AQ. If you play very well in large pots, you can loosen up sli
ghtly more still, but stick to suited hands with high-card strength. Even if you
r opponents are extremely loose and crazy, you cannot play speculative hands pro
fitably if you must pay three or more bets to see the flop.