Randomizing Your Starting Hand Selection in Poker

One of the keys to being a successful poker player is to be deceptive in order to cause your opponents to commit mistakes. And, most poker players figure that the best way to be deceptive is to “mix up their play” by doing something irregular, such as raising a marginal hand or limping in with Aces. Unfortunately, what these players fail to realize is that these irregular plays actually cause you to be more predictable! The best way to be unpredictable is to always do the same thing no matter the strength of your hand; by doing this, your opponents won’t be able to decipher any anomalies in your play.

Think of it this way, if your opponent has you pegged as a tight player, and has seen 20 hands you have played from early position -every hand being AQ+ and TT+– you’re going to find yourself being moved off a lot of low ragged boards, like 457, 559, and so forth. It will be obvious to your opponents that these boards didn’t help you. Now most players will try to thwart their opponents’ efforts by randomly playing some lesser hand like 67s, but unfortunately, most players either mix in these lesser hands too much, or too little.

If you’re playing too many marginal hands than you’re no longer a tight player: If you are playing too few, your opposition probably won’t take much notice of these random outliers, and will take them for what they are: A paltry effort on your part to mix up your play.

The trick is too mix in enough lesser hands that you are still a tight player, but at the same time be playing enough marginal hands to keep your opponents honest, so that just about every conceivable flop may have helped you.

So, instead of arbitrarily playing a random hand you should go into a session of poker knowing exactly what ‘random’ hands you are going to be playing. I use a 75/25 ratio to determine how many lesser hands I need to be playing to confuse my opponents: So, for every three legitimate hands I play, I want to be playing a single lesser hand.

Suppose your typical opening range from early position is AA/KK/QQ/JJ/TT/AK/AQ/AJs/KQs: There are 70 different ways to be dealt these nine hands -6 each for the pairs, 16 each for AK and AQ, and 4 each for AJs and KQs-so to arrive at my 75/25 percentage I need to be adding 17 or 18 hand combinations to my playlist. Obviously it can’t be something as simple as 67, since there are 16 combinations for that hand. Instead I use suited connectors and pairs, and further streamline these hands by choosing certain suits.

So if your goal is to cover flops that are 9 and under, you could simply incorporate playing any red suited connector -diamonds or hearts– from 34 to JQ. This would be nine different hands with two possible combinations each (since you’re not playing spades or clubs).

Or, you could add pairs and suited connectors by simply choosing 1 suit for suited connectors (a total of 9 combinations) and playing any pair that is red -hearts and diamonds-between 22 and 99 (a total of 8 combinations).

By doing this, there is no single flop that will not help you, and you will still be playing a tight enough game that your raises will be respected pre-flop. This gives you the best of both worlds: Respect both pre-flop and post-flop, no matter what cards fall.