Rakeback.com Poker School is aimed for beginning Texas Hold'em players their bankroll for bigger games. In seven lessons you will learn all the necessary to win in long-run

1. RAKEBACK.COM – Don’t Play Poker Without It Poker School – Lesson 2

2. Lesson 2 | Starting Hands In this installment of Poker School, we'll be starting off with some table selection, look at starting hands (chart included) and see how our position affects our preflop decisions.

3. Lesson 2 | Table Selection When you're playing poker with the intention of winning money, you want to play against as bad opponents as possible. This is where many aspiring players have lots of work to do, as after they've learned some basic rules about starting hands and pot odds, they just want to sit down and play but don't take the time to evaluate the tables available. When you're checking out the tables, you want to find the easy ones filled with bad players ("fish"), and avoid the ones with lots of tight and aggressive players because there your winnings will be slim at best.

4. Lesson 2 | How can you find the tables with fish? Well, there's some characteristics that give away if the table is a good one or a bad one. First and foremost the most important stat you can find is the "average players on the flop" that some of the sites offer. As we'll see later, you should play a bit under 20% of your starting hands in a regular game, and if you see a table that has 50% of the players seeing the flop, you can make some assumptions about the looseness of the game in question. Other factors to look at when selecting tables are average size of the pot (bigger is usually better, but not always), preflop raise percentage (low raise percentage means passive play, which is good for us), and also if you can identify some of the players in the game to be either tough or easy prey. The reason why tables with huge average pots can sometimes not be optimal ones to play in is that huge pots usually derive from aggressive play of some of the players, and we don't want those aggressive players in our game unless we know how to handle them.

5. Lesson 2 | Starting Hands and Position The single most devastating error found in new players game is that they play far too many hands preflop, and go too far with them postflop. I hope that after reading this part of the article, you will understand what makes a good starting hand and what kind of things to consider when making decisions about playing a certain hand. Just about everyone and their mother knows that the best starting hand you can have in texasholdem is two aces in the hole (AA). Most of the people also recognize that big pairs like kings, queens, jacks and tens are very good hands, and also big suited cards like AKs and AQs are powerfull enough to play and to make profit with. What most people don't realize though, is that any two picture cards don't necessarily make up a good starting hand. Many people also disregard the position they are in the hand when choosing to play or fold their hand, and that's something that I think should be included in the decisionmaking from the get-go. In the next couple of paragraphs I'm using terms early, middle and late position to describe your seat in the table. In a full ten-handed table early position consists of the first three seats away from the big blind, middle position consists of the next three seats and late position consists of the last two (called cut-off and button). In nine-handed table the middle position is only two seats.

6. Lesson 2 | Starting Hands: Early Position When you are in the early position, you need to tighten up and play only the best hands, because you don't really know if someone is going to raise after you, or if there's going to be a pot with many limpers or if it's going to be folded around to the blinds. Also, because you only play the best hands from early position, you will raise many of the hands you play here like the big pairs and big suited cards, you only limp with some of the weaker pairs and suited aces because those hands prefer to play pots with many players rather than against just couple of players (even though they do perform quite well in heads-up situations).

7. Lesson 2 | Starting Hands: Middle Position In the middle positions you can play a bit more hands than in the early positions, and raise some of the hands that you limp in earlier, but the differences aren't really that big. You can also start to limp in with some of the medium sized suited connectors if there's many limpers from the seats before you, as the threath of a raise behind you is somewhat lessened when there's only couple of players left to act after you and the raise doesn't harm you as much because there's lots of players involved.

8. Lesson 2 | Starting Hands: Late Position Late position is where the fun starts. You can start experimenting with lots of different hands in the last two positions because raise behind you is now very unlikely, and your positional advantage after the flop will work for you and make up for the lessened power level of your hand. You can start playing with lots of suited connectors and one-gappers when there's many limpers ahead of you, and start raising with the big suited connectors for value. Also if it's folded around to you in the button or cut-off seat, you can try to steal the blinds with many hands consisting of an ace.

9. Lesson 2 | Some random things to point out about the starting hands. There's a strange misconception that big pairs don't like multiway pots. Every day I hear people moaning about their fate when they raised preflop with aces and got 5 callers. When I try to ask them why they don't like getting that many callers when holding the best hand possible, I hear something like "Someone always catches something and my aces get cracked". I hope you understand how that sentence and the whole idea of not wanting many callers with big pairs is completely illogical. Even if you only won 35% of the pots against 4 callers with aces (and you do win quite a bit more than 35%), you would show steady profit in the long run, as you would be putting in 20% of the money but you would win 35% of the time. Also, regarding the small pairs and lesser aces (A9s and below). These hands play very well either against lots of opponents or heads-up, but perform badly against two or three opponents. As any pair is strong holding in heads-up confrontation and the ability to spike a set and win a huge pot are great against either one or many opponents, against two opponents the small pair ain't that strong by itself, and you don't really have the odds to flop a set either.

10. Thank You Please visit Rakeback.com for more lessons! Rakeback on Facebook: Join Contact Us