What Percentage Of Hands Should You Play In Poker

Without a shadow of a doubt, the most difficult player to combat at the cash game tables or in tournaments is one who plays a loose-aggressive poker strategy and plays it well.

A good loose-aggressive player, or LAG, at your table is a constant thorn in your side. Such players will frequently raise and three-bet preflop, fire more than their fair share of continuation bets, are not afraid to barrel on all three streets, and will pounce on any sign of weakness.

Loose-tight is a measure of how many starting hands you play rather than folding before the flop. Loose players play more hands. Tight players play fewer hands (which, on average, are higher quality). Texas Hold'em is always a game you should play with the long term in mind, if your poker hand has a 55/45 advantage compared to your opponents, you can lose it 10 times in a row. But if you play the hand 10,000 times on average you will win 55% (5.500) times.This is why good bankroll management is important. A quick test of your poker skills.

You can see the extremely low average winning poker hand percentages for commonly played hands like Q-10 or J-9 so my advice would have to be to stick to the premium hands as you learn the game. As you gain more experience you can experiment with those lower percentage starting cards, but you’ll need to be disciplined enough to learn when to continue beyond the flop. Every poker hand’s strength. Play less than 20% of your hands when you are at a table against 9 to 10 players. If you prefer a tight style of playing, use only 10% of your hands before reaching the flop. This may give you the experience and control required to win the game at a low-stakes table. While you should not make a habit of this, it is a good play to have in your arsenal when taking on someone playing a solid loose-aggressive poker strategy. Furthermore, you can extend this.

When no-limit hold’em was first becoming mainstream, there were very few people who knew how to play loose-aggressive poker, or at least were willing to do so. I vividly remember reading an older strategy book when I first discovered poker and seeing a section that said to proceed with extreme caution if you had been reraised, even if you held a hand as strong as pocket kings!

This may have been solid advice in the days of passive poker (played both loose and tight), but with so many players adopting a loose-aggressive poker strategy these days, you would be burning money by playing as advised by that particular book.

What is Loose-Aggressive Poker Strategy?

As its name suggests, a loose-aggressive poker strategy sees players loosen up their starting hand requirements (they play quite a lot of hands, often 30% or more that are dealt to them) and they play them aggressively (by coming out betting and raising).

However, not all LAGs are created equal. Bad LAGs are often reckless and will never find a fold, but LAG players who know the nuances of how to play loose-aggressive poker well almost always know where they stand in a hand and will fold to resistance. The former can be frustrating to play against, but the latter can decimate your stack and bankroll if you are not careful.

What Percentage Of Hands Should You Play In Poker

Loose-Aggressive Poker: Starting Hands

Some LAGs will play literally any two cards dealt to them and rely on their aggression or postflop skill to outmaneuver their opponents once the community cards come into play. If you are looking to start playing with a loose-aggressive poker strategy, it is advised to have some structure to your starting hand requirements.

We mentioned earlier than LAGs play a lot of hands, often 30% or more that they are dealt. Thirty-three percent of hands is a range that would include:

22-AA
54s+
75s++
K8o+
K4s+
A2o+
A2s+

As you can see, 33% represents a lot of hands, which is where some of the strength of a LAG style stems from — you have a difficult time knowing if such players are strong or weak preflop and whether they are betting with a pair, set, draw, or on a bluff after the flop.

How to Combat a Loose-Aggressive Poker Strategy

You have probably gathered by now that taking on those who know how to play loose-aggressive poker can lead to stressful situations at the tables, but that is not to mean that they are unbeatable. You just need to adapt your own style to combat theirs and use their LAG style against them.

First, when playing against LAG players give more consideration to your own starting hand requirements. Finding yourself out of position against LAG players is a nightmare, but even having position on them while holding a weak hand can be equally as difficult.

A hand such as may be a perfectly legitimate hand to open with from the button, but if there is a good loose-aggressive player in the big blind who has been three-betting you all session, it is probably best not to raise here as a steal because you are likely to be playing in a bloated pot with a weak hand against someone who is not going to let you see a cheap showdown.

Second, when up against a LAG consider slowplaying your strong hands both before and after the flop. Players who are starting to get out of line with how frequently they three-bet you are likely to fold to a four-bet because their reraising range is so wide. This gives you the perfect opportunity to simply call a three-bet with strong pairs such as aces, kings, or queens. While you should not make a habit of this, it is a good play to have in your arsenal when taking on someone playing a solid loose-aggressive poker strategy.

Furthermore, you can extend this slowplaying to postflop, too. LAGs will often make a continuation-bet and at least another bet on the turn (barreling), yet put the brakes on when they face strong resistance. Instead of check-raising or raising a hand as strong as a set, let your loose-aggressive opponents have a little more rope with which to hang themselves.

Also think about using an opponent’s loose-aggressive range of starting hands against them by bluffing them. A couple of paragraphs ago we advocated slowplaying big hands preflop, yet you can also four-bet bluff a habitual three-bettor — especially if you have a tighter image — because they will give you credit for a strong hand and they are more likely to be holding something less than stellar.

Likewise, the occasional check-raise bluff on later streets can work wonders if your loose-aggressive opponent has shown to be capable of giving up on a hand when facing aggression.

Conclusion

Like all moves in poker, do not overuse any of the tips mentioned above. If you do, you will become much easier to read, and someone will eventually call your bluff. Once players with a solid loose-aggressive poker strategy figure out what you are trying to do against them, they will target you and make your time at the tables most uncomfortable.

Meanwhile, learn how to play a LAG style yourself and you can be the one making things less comfortable for others at the tables.

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cash game strategytournament strategyno-limit hold’emloose-aggressive styleaggressionbluffingstarting hand selectionposition

Steve Selbrede

My previous article, 'Low Stakes Live Games Differ From Online,' pointed out that live, low-stakes no-limit hold'em games — what I call 'Donkey Games' — play much differently than much tougher online games.

One key statistic showing that difference is VPIP percentage, which refers to how often players Voluntarily Put money In the Pot. This is simply a measure of how loose a player is.

We see from Figure 1 (Row 1) that the average Vegas $1/$2 player has a VPIP of 37 percent, which is nearly 70 percent looser than the average online NL100 player who has a VPIP of just 22 percent. Clearly online poker games play a lot tighter. But just how many hands should we be playing?

Online VPIP

In my first book, The Statistics of Poker, I analyzed about 6 million hand histories for online NL50 and NL100. Figure 2 below is a plot of the average online Win Rate for online players with various VPIP percentages.

This shows that the 'peak' player wins about 1 BB per hundred hands by playing about 15 percent of his hands. Notice that the 'average' online player loses about 5 BB/100 by playing 22 percent of his hands (the square symbol). What this plot tells us is that the average 15 percent VPIP player is a modest winner, but the average 22 percent VPIP player is a big loser. Notice also that playing 'too tight' is not nearly as damaging to our Win Rate as playing 'too loose.'

However, this curve does not necessarily say that 15 percent VPIP is 'optimum.' The average 15 percent player is actually mixture of strong and weak players, so the strongest 15 percent VPIP players will win more than 1 BB/100. In fact, it seems plausible that the best players can get away with playing a few more hands than 15 percent. I have analyzed the raw data in many different ways and have concluded that the optimum online VPIP is 15-16 percent.

Live VPIP

Producing a curve like Figure 2 for live play is practically impossible. However, we can get fairly reliable average VPIP values for live games by recording just a few hundred live hand histories. I have done this for four Vegas card rooms, finding that the average Vegas VPIP is about 37 percent.

Though some tables are tighter than others, VPIP changes very little between the Strip and off-Strip rooms. It may be slightly tighter during the morning and somewhat looser on weekends, but the variation is not generally dramatic. Even Vegas $2/$5 games are similarly loose.

So Vegas low-stakes NLH games are much looser than online games. How should we expect this to affect the optimal VPIP of a Vegas game?

The extra looseness of Vegas low-stakes NLH is not the only factor to consider. Since there are more players per pot in the Vegas game, and since Vegas players are much worse than online players, the average pot size is larger (see Figure 1, Row 7). That implies we should be able to play more hands in the Vegas game, especially when we have position.

But we shouldn't go crazy here. We can't maximize our Vegas profit by playing as many hands as our opponents do. But if we are skillful postflop, and if we add our 'extra' hands in late position, we should be able to increase our 'optimal' VPIP to around 20 percent.

We will never know (based on data) what this optimum really is, but 20 percent is a reasonable initial target for an average Donkey Game. If the game is tighter than normal, with fewer players limping and with smaller pots, playing a bit tighter is usually a good adjustment. For extremely loose and passive games, we can usually play a bit looser.

The final factor in how loose to play is the quality of your own postflop play. If you are only a slight winning player at 20 percent VPIP, you should consider playing a bit tighter. Once you fix your major postflop leaks, you can consider adding additional marginal hands, especially in late position.

Position

The previous discussion only considered average VPIP, ignoring the critical importance of position (this will be the topic of my next article). Nevertheless, if you play live low-stakes no-limit hold'em, you are probably too loose.

You can estimate your live VPIP in a fairly straight-forward way — just count your VPIP hands for a few sessions. If your card room deals about 35 hands per hour, you can get a reasonable convergence in just 5 or 10 hours.

If you are somewhere near 20 percent, you are in the right ballpark. But if you are playing 30 percent, 40 percent, or even more of your hands, you should begin thinking about how to fix this leak.

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