One of the cool things about no limit holdem poker is that a ton of good stuff happens before we ever see the flop. In fact, you can put yourself in a lot of trouble or set yourself up for success with a simple decision. That is, “Which hole cards do I play and how do I go about playing them?” Much has been made of pre-flop hand selection and all of it bears repeating. If you don’t choose the right cards, then you can cost yourself needless money in both cash games and tournaments, and you can set yourself up for disaster later in hands.

One of the challenges of this sort of poker is finding patience. Too many players don’t have the ability to fold five or even ten straight hands, so they will get into a habit of playing bad cards. These are mistakes that free poker and play poker players make. If you really want to learn poker, then you have to understand table position and how it relates to selection.

There are certainly exceptions that can be made to these rules, especially when it comes to poker tournament play, but these things will serve as a nice base for any beginning player. You need to understand early position, middle position, and late position. At a typical 9-handed table, early position is when you are in either of the blinds, the first to act position, and fourth base. Middle position would be considered the next two to three spots, and late position would be the guy on the dealer button and the two players before him. So how is this information important?

The range of hands that you should play from early position is much smaller than your range in middle or late position. Early position players should never be limping into pots with marginal hands. Instead, they should be playing big face cards and medium to high pocket pairs. If you start limping into pots with hands like King-9 from early position, you stand to lose a lot of chips as you’ll have to fold to any raise. From middle position, you can loosen up a little bit, and any raise that you make will have intentions of forcing out the players behind you and giving yourself the position advantage for the rest of the hand. When you’re in late position, you have the advantage of acting after your opponent. You should play more hands from this spot, and especially those hands where you’ll be drawing at a straight or flush.

All in all your pre-flop strategy needs to include this knowledge, as well as a general rule about hand strength. There is no reason to waste big blinds by playing face cards with weak kickers or dumb hands like 9-5. All too often, you’ll end up hitting your pair, only to find that you are out kicked and in trouble. If you tighten up, play only strong hands, and understand when to raise in position, you’ll put yourself in a spot to succeed later in the hand.