Preflop Strategy: Which Hands to Play from Every Position

Preflop is the one street you play in every single hand, which makes it the highest-leverage part of your game to fix. Most losing players lose the money before the flop ever comes down — not by misplaying aces, but by entering pots with hands and positions that cannot be played profitably no matter what happens next.

Why does preflop matter more than any other street?

Three reasons. First, frequency: you make a preflop decision every hand, but you only see a river in a minority of them, so a small preflop leak compounds thousands of times faster than a river leak. Second, everything downstream inherits from it — a bad preflop call puts you on the flop with a dominated hand, out of position, in a pot you never should have been in. Third, it is the only street you can genuinely memorize. Postflop requires judgment; preflop is close to a lookup table, and the lookup table is free.

The style this article teaches is tight-aggressive (TAG): play a disciplined share of hands, and when you do play, come in raising. If the VPIP stat means anything to you, the target this produces at 6-max is roughly 20-24%.

What does "top 13% of hands" actually mean?

Range percentages confuse people because there are two ways to count hands, and they give different numbers. There are 169 distinct starting-hand classes (AA, AKs, AKo, and so on), but 1,326 actual two-card combinations — and the classes are not equally likely:

When this site says a range is "top 13%," it means 13% of the 1,326 combinations — about 174 combos — not 13% of the 169 classes. An offsuit broadway like AJo swells a range three times faster than a suited hand does, which is why ranges that look short on paper ("just add AJo and KQo") grow so quickly in percentage terms. Keeping the counting straight is what makes the numbers below consistent with our range library and the per-hand recommendations on our 169 hand pages.

How wide should you open from each position?

These are the house baseline ranges for 6-max, 100bb deep, when the pot is unopened in front of you. They are the same standard used across our range library, solver trainer, and hand pages:

The big blind is different because you already have money in and close the action: defend (call or 3-bet) roughly a fifth of hands against an early open and close to half against a button open — the same top-~50%-vs-late-open standard our 169 hand pages use — leaning on 3-bets with your strongest hands plus suited-ace bluffs.

UTG — the discipline seat (~13%)

Five players still act behind you, so you open only hands that stay playable under pressure: every pocket pair, the strong suited broadways, AJo+ and KQo. Nothing weaker — no A9o, no QJo, no 76s. See the full breakdown in our UTG guide, or drill a specific holding like KQo on its hand page.

MP — one notch wider (~17%)

One fewer player behind you buys a modest expansion: weaker suited aces (A9s-A8s, plus A5s for its wheel-and-blocker value) and the first extra offsuit hands — ATo, KJo, and QJo. If MP opens feel exciting, you are doing it wrong — this is still a tight, value-heavy range.

CO — where stealing starts (~28%)

Now only three players can wake up with a hand, two of whom are in the blinds. Add every suited ace, suited connectors down to 65s, gappers like J9s and T8s, and the remaining offsuit broadways. When the button is a tight player, the cutoff effectively becomes the button — attack accordingly.

BTN — the profit seat (~45%)

You act last on every postflop street, which is the single biggest structural edge in the game — the math is laid out in our button position article. Nearly half of all hands are profitable opens here: every pair, every ace, most suited kings and queens, all the suited connectors, and the offsuit broadways. If your button open percentage is below 30, you are burning the best real estate in poker.

SB — raise or fold (~35%)

The small blind is the worst postflop seat, but half your bet is already in the middle and only one player can call. Open a range between CO and BTN width, use a bigger raise (3.5-4x) to deny the big blind an easy defend, and never open-limp. Limping announces weakness and invites exactly the multiway, out-of-position pots that lose money — here is why limping bleeds chips.

BB — defend wide, you close the action (~50% vs late opens)

The big blind never opens; it defends, and it defends wider than any opening range because the price is discounted. Facing a standard 3x button open, you call 2bb more into a 4.5bb pot — 2 ÷ 6.5, or about 31% raw equity to break even before postflop play (run your own spots in the pot odds calculator). Against a 45% button range, a huge share of hands clears that bar, which is why the house standard defends close to half of all hands against late opens but only about a fifth against a tight UTG open — there is no discount deep enough to make J8o profitable against a 13% range. Discount your continues for playing every street out of position, and keep the 3-bet slice polarized: big hands for value, suited wheel aces as bluffs.

What does the equity data say?

These ranges are not aesthetic preferences — they follow from how much pot equity hands actually have. The table below comes from our own Monte Carlo simulations (300,000 trials per matchup, full boards dealt, ties split evenly), the same data that powers every hand page on this site:

Three lessons hide in that table. First, even pocket aces fall from 85% equity heads-up to a coin flip against five callers — which is exactly why you raise: thinning the field protects your equity. Second, hand rankings are not equity rankings: deuces nose out JTs heads-up (50.3% vs a random hand) but collapse to 15% six-way, while JTs keeps live straight and flush outs — that is why suited connectors play multiway pots and small pairs play for sets. Third, the gap between playable and trash is enormous: 72o wins barely a third of the time against one random hand. Run any matchup yourself in the equity calculator or test whole ranges against each other in the range equity calculator.

How should you respond when someone else raises first?

Mostly: 3-bet or fold. Against a tight UTG open, 3-bet pure value — QQ+, AKs, AKo — and fold nearly everything else, because a 13% range has no soft middle to attack (our 3-bet guide covers the mechanics). Against a 45% button open, widen to roughly 8-12% and polarize: big pairs and broadways for value, suited wheel aces (A5s-A2s) as bluffs that block aces and make nut hands when called.

The main exceptions to 3-bet-or-fold: small pocket pairs flat-call to set-mine when both stacks are deep — you flop a set about 12% of the time, so look for roughly 15-to-1 in implied odds — and suited broadways can call in position against wide openers. What never works is flatting dominated offsuit hands out of position because they "look too pretty to fold."

The five cardinal rules

Common questions