Low Limit Holdem Preflop Strategy: Early Position

Early position in fixed limit Holdem is not a fun position to play from. The biggest problem is the fact that you have little-to-no knowledge of your opponents’ intentions. They may be preparing to fold or they may have a monster hand that they plan on capping all the way down.

When playing from early position, the best strategy you can adopt is an extremely tight one. You cannot play many hands profitably from early position because it is difficult to play those hands during the rest of the hand. In most cases, you’ll have to fold your hand and wait for the next round of cards. The hands you should be looking for are hands that you can raise – hands such as AA, KK, AKs and AKo.

If you play with a tight strategy from early position, most of your preflop decisions will be easy. With hands such as those listed above, all you have to do is raise and re-raise until the betting is capped. Those hands are the best hand at the table the majority of the time. Every once in a while you’ll run into a stronger hand but that doesn’t happen often enough for it to be worth worrying about.

Raising for Value

Some poker players have a problem with raising strong hands from early position, especially AKs and AKo. These players say that they miss the flop most of the time and end up just losing more money. Instead, they say, they like to limp in for cheap and see what happens on the flop.

That line of thought almost makes sense but it’s not quite right. Those players do have it right when they say that they miss the flop most of the time. AK does miss the flop most of the time but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be raised. In fact, if you don’t raise with AK, your win rate will actually suffer. Here’s why:

With hands like AK, you won’t win the majority of the time but you will still win more often than everyone else. The more money you get in the middle with an advantage (no matter how slight), the more you make over the long run. Let’s use an example to demonstrate this.

Let’s say you have AKs in early position and put in a normal raise. Three opponents call your raise and for whatever reason, they all decide they are going to stay in to the river. In all likelihood, you’re not going to win this hand but that’s OK because you have math on your side.

Against three random hands, AKs will win about 40% of the time. This is just a rough calculation but it’s close enough. The other random hands will each win about 20% of the time. Even though you have less than a 50% chance to win, you will actually profit if you put money in the pot. The reason is because every player in the hand must contribute an equal amount of money to the pot, but you have a higher chance than anyone else to win the pot.

Let’s say you get in this situation 100 times and each time the pot reaches $100. Each player in the hand contributes $25 to the pot so every time you win a pot, you net $75. With a 40% chance to win, that means you would win about 40 of these pots for a total take home of $3,000 (40 x $75).

The other 60 times, you will lose the pot. The total sum of losses for that would be $1,500 (60 x 25). Now subtract those losses from your wins and you’ll see that over 100 instances of this same situation, you will net a total of $1,500 in pure profit. This is despite the fact that you lose the hand 60% of the time!

The primary purpose of raising hands from early position is for value. Every call your opponents make with inferior hands is money in your pocket. Over the long run, the more you charge your opponents to play, the more money you’ll make. There will be short term ups and downs but if you stick with it, you’ll see a profit.

Raising to Protect Your Hand

Preflop raises also serve to protect your hand as a secondary benefit. They cut down on the odds your opponents get to try to suck out on you with weak hands. Strong hands are not invulnerable so you need to charge your opponents to try to beat you with weaker hands.

If you limp in with strong hands, you give your opponents good pot odds to try to suck out on you. Instead, you should charge them and let them make the mistake of calling. Sometimes they’ll suck out on you anyways but there’s nothing you can do about that. As long as you do your job and make them pay to play, you’ll do well at the tables.

Raises also cut down on the number of opponents you have to play against. The fewer opponents you have in the pot with you, the easier it is to win the pot. If you limp in with a strong hand such as AA and let 5 players see the flop for almost nothing, you’ll probably lose the hand. The key to making money in fixed limit Holdem is to consistently get money in the middle while you have strong hands and your opponents have weak hands.

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