Poker Coaching Tip – The Most Powerful Move You Can Make Pre-Flop

For me the most powerful move preflop is the re-raise, yet it is also one of the most misused plays in poker. Ive held numerous poker coaching sessions with amateurs and intermediates alike, and without exception, most people struggle in this area.

This poker coaching article is aimed at the beginner poker player who is playing in the low stakes games, either live or online. The key in these games is to weigh  your re-raises to value hands (i.e. good hands), rather than using a re-raise to bluff. Remember, as we discussed in my poker bluffing article, people at low stakes don’t like to fold, therefore, we should be less inclined to bluff.

So what are the value hands we should be re-raising pre-flop. Well a good distribution is something like AA KK QQ JJ AK, versus looser players we could also throw in hands like TT AQ KQss. These hands represent about the top 5% of starting hands, So in reality, we are only raising about 1 in 20 times we get dealt a hand. Whilst this is a very tight re-raise range, at the low stakes this should serve you well, people at this level simply are not good enough to understand how tight, and therefore how strong your range is.

As an example, say an opponent raises to $1 in a $25 cash game. We have QQ and re-raise to $4. Lets say our opponent has AJ, he’ll call, because his hand looks pretty, he just wants to play poker, he’s not thinking about what we have. The flop comes J47, he bets $6, and we re-raise with our overpair (we will cover post flop re-raises in a later article), he sees he has top pair, and goes all in, ‘he must have AK’, we call and win a big pot. I see this happening all the time at low stakes.

To summarise, remember this simple rule, with big hands we want to play big pots. (n/b this means we don’t play trappy with our big hands, another common novice mistake!)   For more info on this, refer to my continuation betting video series where we discuss this concept and more. 

As always if you have any questions on this article, or any other areas you’d like discussed, add some comments below.

Good luck at the tables, Johnny.