5 Poker Tips for Playing Preflop

14 Mar 2025

Intermediate

This material is for medium-skilled players

Today we're going to talk about preflop strategy and give you five tips for plugging them leaks and becoming a preflop master. We're starting with relatively basic tips that you may have heard before and the advice will get more advanced as we go. 

Let's begin with the most important tip that most of our readers will ever hear. It sounds next: avoid defending too wide from the big blind versus a raise and multiple calls. That is not an exaggeration. This tip could save you thousands of big blinds in your life. It's ABC, plus it’s a little boring. People don't want to hear it, but it's the truth. 

When you're in the big blind and it goes raise, call, call, call, you are absolutely not in any way, shape or form priced in with any of the trashy hands you might think you are. If you're the type of player who just shrugs and calls in this spot with  ,  ,  , the list goes on. You need to either quit poker immediately or tighten up from the big blind. 

It's such a bleed to think that you are priced in this spot and to go ahead and call, especially playing live poker where the preflop raise can be three big blinds, four big blinds, even five big blinds. It's kind of boring, but tighter is better. Hands like  ,  ,  ,  , totally fine. But the semi-trashy hands and the trashy hands especially, let them go. Save more big blinds postflop and plug that leak immediately. 

Let's continue with looking at the big blind right now. When a player raises and the action folds to you, don't 3-bet with only premium hands. For this spot, we'll assume that we're playing against a good thinking player and not a tight recreational player, or a passive player / a calling station or anything like that. We'll look at playing versus a button raise first of all, using Lucid GTO to see what types of hands we want to 3-bet:

Some obvious 3-bet bluffs in there like   and  , but look at all the types of hands like  ,  ,   is virtually a pure 3-bet. Even hands like  ,  , the list goes on. These are really important because our opponent is raising around 45% of hands and when we 3-bet, we're making them fold around 60% of the time. That's really quite a lot of folds that we're generating just by 3-betting correctly. 

If you have   and you're making   fold always, if you've got  , and you're making   snap fold, you're just doing so much better than if you're too passive in this spot and just calling. Also say you do 3-bet on the button calls. You're now playing a 3-bet pot as the aggressor instead of a single raise pot as the caller. You have a range advantage on way more boards and you get to rep hands like ace king on king seven deuce when you've got  , for example. 

If we take a look now at big blind versus under the gun, we'll see that we're not three betting as aggressively, but it's still really important to find the suited aces, the suited connectors, the suited broadways and the low frequency combos of hands like  ,  ,  , and so on. 

Again, winning the pot preflop is really nice. And another important factor is we now have board coverage on a variety of flops. If our range is really broadway heavy when we 3-bet and the flop comes down six five four, for example, our range is really struggling as a result. 

Last thing I'll say with this, you can't just plug this leak, and go from massively under 3-betting from the big blind to suddenly 3-betting all these combos that you're not used to playing. It's something you need to implement slowly and surely.

Also really important: make sure you have a good idea of how to play post flop. So all of a sudden you're not seeing flops with a much wider range and you're not sure how to play it. I cannot stress enough how important it is to be 3-betting aggressively and correctly from the big blind instead of being too passive and just calling with too many hands.

People assume that if you had a pretty good hand, you would have just flicked in the call because you were getting great pot odds. So when you decide to 3-bet, they tend to put you on a very strong hand. And might even make some really big folds with hands like   or even like   when they're supposed to call or 4-bet. You really get a lot of respect, at least at first. 

I also want to reiterate a point about studying postflop after 3-betting from the big blind. So you're not a fish out of water when you actually reach the flop with this wide range. For example, using the Lucid Poker trainer, we can look at a particular situation:

The button opens, the big blind 3-bets, the button calls, and we get an    flop. You might think, well, I 3-bet pre-flop, that's an Ace high flop. I should see bet this flop maybe every time, maybe 80% of the time, whatever. I'm going to leverage my range advantage and I'm going to bet very often. 

But if we look at how this spot is actually played by the solver, we could see that on    after 3-betting from the big blind, it checks 62% of the time facing the button. So you can imagine how big of a mistake it will end up being to just bet every time when the solver is checking well over half the time. 

And this is the type of thing where poker studying just can't be substituted. This is not going to be a simple problem to figure out. You really just have to dig into solver solutions using poker tools and see how you're supposed to play your range generally on different boards. And then you'll be better prepared to play this loose big blind 3-betting range post-flop. 

With that said, I think we're ready for tip number three. We've just spoken about the importance of playing a good theory-based strategy in the right spots. But players who just stick religiously to their preflop charts without deviating are making costly errors. We use our poker charts as a guide. They are not set in stone. And we must be happy to deviate really quite often. 

One perfect example, recreational players and weaker, more passive players, they call pre-flop too much versus raises with hands that they shouldn't. If I'm under the gun and there's a recreational player on the button, I don't open a hand like  . That'll be a mix sometimes. I also don't open a hand like the  . That'll also be a mix sometimes. 

What's more, the pros all want to play with that weaker player. So the blinds are more likely to call that a little bit wider, which means more multi-way pots and obviously we have less equity. Or they squeeze to try and target and isolate the weaker player on the button. So it's just a bad scenario to be opening these marginal hands. The exploit that I make there is I tighten up and I don't open with these marginal hands, which are more likely to be out of position. 

Another way we can deviate from our charts is when we have really aggressive players behind who will 3-bet super aggressively. Let's ditch hands like   under the gun and   under the gun plus 1 in that spot and open stronger, more robust ranges that won't have to fold really often versus the inevitable 3-bets that are coming our way. 

These two examples are all about exploiting pre-flop by not raising. You can exploit in other ways like flatting monsters pre-flop to induce squeezes versus aggressive players, but a tip within a tip here, if you want to do that, if you want to flat pre-flop with like   and   to induce squeezes, do it when you're under the gun plus 1 or under the gun plus 2. 

If the hijack raises, you should never flat aces in the cutoff or the button because it's so less likely that someone squeezes. And if you've got aces and you're seeing a flop in a single raise pot, that's just a disaster compared to seeing a 3-bet pot in position. So if you want to flat those monsters, do it when you're under the gun plus 1 or under the gun plus 2 and never from a late position. 

Again, really important, let's tighten up your calling ranges in games with high poker rake. We've spoken about not calling too wide from the big blind multiway earlier. Let's go back and revisit the big blind and now focus on higher rake environments. 

One of the great things about Lucid GTO Trainer is that we have a high rake pre-flop chart to go with a more normalized rake structure. Look at the types of hands that are now not calling in a higher rake environment when the button raises and the big blind is constructing their defending range:

 ,  ,  , and then suited hands like  ,  ,  ,  , the list goes on. You can defend these in normal rake structures, but when the rake is higher, these no longer become profitable, and we unfortunately have to just let them go. 

It's really important that we're mindful of the higher rake environments we find ourselves in and we adjust accordingly, because like I say, some calls go from being slightly profitable to slightly losing based on the rake structure. 

Beating the rake doesn't just apply from the big blind either. If we look at how the button responds versus a cutoff raise, we'll actually see Lucid play no flats at all here:

Comparing that to a reasonable rake structure, we'll see that there's a big difference. Overall, being tighter and more aggressive preflop will be higher EV in the high rake structures. In general, calling actions are going to be the ones that suffer the most in high rake environments because you're essentially guaranteeing that you're going to the flop and you're going to pay that rake, which reduces your pot odds. Aggressive actions don't tend to get penalized quite as much. 

In a lot of spots, you'll see a high rake sim playing just as loose when it comes to raising compared to a normal rake. So a lot of the time, you can still raise roughly the same range. You could still roughly 3-bet the same range. But when it comes to calling, you really got to tighten the screws on your preflop game. And the goal here is to avoid paying that costly rake because if you just raise and take it down preflop, you don't pay any rake at all. 

My last tip is to err on the side of aggression rather than passivity. It is so easy when we play to fall into the trap of being a loose, passive player, flying preflop in every spot with certain hands, being a bit too loose, not being aggressive, not 3-betting enough, letting players behind us into the pot for cheap, letting the original raiser see a flop for cheap. 

We all know how tough it is to play against an aggressive opponent who constantly has their foot on the gas. Let's be that player. As well as that, one of the benefits of playing like this is that particularly at lower stakes games, people don't 4-bet bluff anywhere near as much as they should, which means we're going to get to see a lot of flops in position, we're going to be the aggressor, we're going to get to just c-bet and take it down a lot. 

It's much more profitable to be the aggressor compared to being passive and just calling a lot of the time. We can use Lucid again to look at our cut-off 3-bet range versus a hijack open:

So many suited broadways in there, lots of off-suit broadways, suited connectors, suited aces, even hands like pocket 7s are in there as a 3-bet. Instead of flatting pre-flop and allowing other players in, let's be the aggressive player who's putting in those re-raises, making our opponents uncomfortable, and playing bigger pots, heads up, as the aggressor. So that’s it for today! Thanks for reading, and have a nice weekend y'all!