Preflop play in Limit hold 'em concerns decisions made on the first betting round, before the three-card flop is dealt. Conventional wisdom holds that your most important decision is which hands to play and which to fold. However, a bit of a revisionist school of thought has coalesced around Ed Miller's Small Stakes Hold 'em. This book holds that, although preflop decisions are certainly important, it's postflop play where inexpert play costs the most money.
Preflop decisions can be a particularly heated topic of discussion in hold 'em, because there are only 169 combinations of significantly different hands (counting, for example, ace-king suited and ace-king offsuit separately, but not A♥K♣ or A&diamonds; K♣).
Playing against a preflop raise
A particular leak many players have is loose calling against a raise before the flop. This is called cold-calling and is almost never the correct play.
There is a basic rule of thumb that should be remembered when trying to decide what to do when facing a raise. That rule is that you need a better hand to call a raise with than you would have needed to raise yourself. The raiser has told you, via the raise, that she has a solid hand. So, your hand needs to have even greater value than the value you think the raiser would need.
For example, there's a raise to you preflop by a solid player. You think she'd raise with any pocket pair down to 9s, AK, AQ and maybe AJ. You'll need a hand better than this to keep playing.
Now, what about calling versus raising after a raise before you? If you have one of the hands that is better than you estimate the raiser needs, you should seriously consider raising it as well. Most of these hands will play well against many players or heads-up. Since the raise your opponent put in will likely knock players behind you out, you might as well raise to get the pot heads-up.
Heads-up you have excellent equity with one of these premium hands. Against many players you have decent equity and will be getting good implied odds, so you don't mind a big field with a premium hand. But against a couple opponents your implied odds suffer and your equity will be cut.
So, when facing a raise, either raise it yourself - if your hand justifies a raise - or fold.
One note, if there has been a raise and a number of cold callers already, you can loosen up and play hands with big implied odds such as mid-to-high suited connectors and suited aces. You won't often hit your hand but when you do the pots will be huge and will generally pay for the times you missed.
| PokerWiki's guide to limit hold 'em preflop play | |||||||||||||
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