Introduction
Preflop play forms the foundation of your entire poker strategy. Every hand begins with a preflop decision, and mistakes made here cascade into increasingly difficult postflop situations. Master these fundamentals, and you'll find yourself in profitable spots far more consistently. Let's examine five common preflop errors that cost players money and, more importantly, how to fix them.
1. Opening Too Wide from Early Position
One of the most expensive leaks in low-stakes poker is opening too many hands from early position. The logic seems sound—"I have a decent hand, why not open?"—but the mathematics tell a different story.
Why This Hurts Your Win Rate
When you open from UTG or UTG+1, you face action from 7-8 players behind you. Each of these players can hold premium hands, and collectively they'll wake up with strong holdings frequently enough to make your marginal opens unprofitable. Opening hands like A8o, K9s, or 65s from early position creates situations where:
- You face 3-bets from tighter ranges that dominate your holding
- You're called by better hands that you can't easily identify postflop
- You play large pots out of position with weak holdings
- You miss most flops and are forced to continuation bet into multiple opponents
The Fix: Tighten Your Early Position Range
A solid UTG opening range should be approximately 15% of hands. This includes:
- Premium Pairs: 77+ (some fold 77 from UTG at deeper stacks)
- Suited Broadway: ATs+, KTs+, QJs
- Offsuit Broadway: AJo+, KQo
From UTG+1 you can expand slightly to include hands like 66, A9s, K9s, and QTs, bringing your opening frequency to around 17-18%. The key principle: if you can't comfortably call a 3-bet or play the hand postflop from early position, it doesn't belong in your opening range.
2. Cold Calling 3-Bets with Medium Pairs
Medium pairs like 88-TT look strong. They're ahead of most unpaired hands, and hitting a set is profitable. However, cold calling 3-bets with these hands creates a consistent leak for most players.
The Problem with Passive Play
When you cold call a 3-bet with 99, you'll face overcards on approximately 70% of flops. On a board like K♠ 7♥ 4♦, you have a pair, but you're behind any king, and your opponent's 3-betting range is heavily weighted toward hands with big cards. You face an uncomfortable decision: do you call a continuation bet with a hand that's likely behind, or fold a made pair?
Stack-to-pot ratio (SPR) also becomes problematic. After calling a 3-bet, the remaining effective stacks are typically shallow relative to the pot size. This limits your maneuverability and forces all-or-nothing decisions postflop.
The Fix: Play These Hands More Aggressively
You have several better options than cold calling:
- Fold to Large 3-Bets: Against tight 3-bettors who only raise with premium hands, folding 88-TT is often correct. You're not getting the implied odds needed to profitably set mine, and playing against QQ+/AK out of position is unprofitable.
- 4-Bet as a Bluff: Against aggressive 3-bettors, consider occasionally 4-betting hands like 88-99 as bluffs. These hands have decent blockers (blocking set combinations) and play well when called. This also balances your 4-betting range and prevents opponents from exploiting you.
- Call with a Clear Plan: If you do call, have a specific postflop strategy. Are you check-folding most overcards? Check-calling and re-evaluating on the turn? Decide before the flop, not when facing pressure.
3. Not Adjusting Open Sizes
Using the same raise size from every position is a fundamental error that signals inexperience and costs you money. More importantly, it fails to account for the strategic purpose of raise sizing: manipulating your postflop environment.
Understanding Raise Size Strategy
Your opening size should accomplish specific goals based on your position and the game dynamics. You're not just "raising to 2.5bb because that's the standard"—you're raising to create profitable postflop situations.
Standard Online Tournament Sizing
- Early/Middle Position: 2.5bb—You want to thin the field while building a pot with strong hands
- Cutoff/Button: 2-2.5bb—Smaller sizes get folds from the blinds at similar frequencies while risking less when you're bluffing
- Small Blind: 3bb—Compensates for your terrible position by making it expensive for the big blind to realize equity
Critical Cash Game Adjustments
Live cash games, particularly at low stakes, require significant sizing adjustments because of dramatically different table dynamics. The standard 2.5bb open that works online often gets 3-4 callers in a 1/2 or 1/3 game, creating multi-way pots where your equity and playability suffer.
Think about your desired postflop context:
- Want Isolation? If you're opening A♠Q♠ from the cutoff and there are three loose passive players behind you, opening to 2.5bb invites multi-way action. Increase to 4-5bb to reduce callers and play heads-up in position.
- Have a Premium Hand? With AA or KK from middle position at a splashy table, opening to 5-7bb maximizes value against stations who call too wide while keeping the pot heads-up or three-way.
- Stealing from Late Position? Against tight blinds who respect aggression, opening to 2-2.5bb from the button with weak hands costs less when you get caught bluffing and achieves folds at similar frequencies.
The principle is simple: adjust your sizing based on what postflop situation you want to create. If you're getting too many callers with your value hands, increase your sizing. If your steals are working too often, consider decreasing your size to risk less when stealing. Match your sizing to the specific game dynamics at your table.
Stack Depth Considerations
At shallow stacks (20-40bb), larger opening sizes commit you to the pot and reduce your postflop maneuverability. Conversely, at deeper stacks (150bb+), smaller openings give you more flexibility and allow you to realize your skill edge postflop. Adjust accordingly.
4. Over-Defending the Big Blind
Perhaps no position creates more confusion than big blind defense. Players hear "you're getting good pot odds" and conclude they should defend extremely wide. This thinking is costly.
The Pot Odds Trap
Against a 2.5bb open from the button, you're getting 3.5:1 pot odds (you need to win 22.2% of the time to break even). Many players interpret this as "I can defend any two cards" or "I only need to win 1 in 5 times." This ignores the realities of out-of-position play.
The problem isn't the math—it's the execution. Weak hands like J6o, 94s, or K3o theoretically have enough equity to continue profitably, but only if you play them perfectly postflop while out of position against a skilled, aggressive opponent. In practice, these hands bleed money through:
- Dominated situations you can't escape
- Difficult turn and river decisions when you catch a piece
- Paying off opponents when you hit second-best hands
- Folding to pressure when you miss entirely
The Fix: Minimum Defense Frequency (MDF) vs. Reality
The theoretical minimum defense frequency against a 2.5bb open is around 60%. However, this assumes perfect postflop play and no rake. In reality, you should defend closer to 40-45% of hands from the big blind against button opens, and even tighter against earlier position opens.
Construct your defense range around:
- Pairs: 22+ (all pairs, all the time)
- Strong Broadways: ATo+, KTo+, QTo+, JTo (with caution)
- Suited Hands: Any suited ace, suited kings down to K7s, suited connectors down to 54s, one-gappers down to 64s
- Playable Offsuit: A9o+, K9o+ (tighter against early position opens)
When in doubt, fold marginal hands. The big blind is a losing position—you're trying to minimize losses, not manufacture profit from trash holdings.
5. Open Limping (Almost) Always a Mistake
Open limping—being the first player to enter the pot by calling rather than raising—is perhaps the clearest indicator of a recreational player. With rare exceptions, open limping surrenders too much value and strategic flexibility.
Why Limping Fails
When you open limp, you:
- Surrender Initiative: You enter the pot with a passive action, signaling weakness and inviting aggression. You're not building a pot with strong hands or applying pressure with weak ones.
- Invite Multi-Way Pots: Other players can limp behind cheaply, creating multi-way pots where equity is divided and playability suffers. Your A♠Q♠ that would dominate heads-up now competes against multiple players who each hit a piece of the flop.
- Face Isolation Raises: Aggressive players will raise behind your limp, forcing you to call a raise out of position or fold, often with hands you intended to play. You've accomplished nothing except putting in 1bb you now have to forfeit.
- Make Yourself Predictable: If you only limp with speculative hands (small pairs, suited connectors), observant opponents will never give you action when you hit. If you limp with strong hands too, you're playing a guessing game that benefits no one.
The Fix: Raise or Fold
The principle is simple: if a hand is worth playing, it's worth raising. Opening with a raise allows you to:
- Define your range and narrow the field
- Build a pot when you hold strong hands
- Take the initiative and apply pressure
- Force opponents to make difficult decisions rather than see cheap flops
The Only Exception: Small Blind Limping
The one situation where open limping has merit is from the small blind when the big blind has an extremely wide, passive defending range. If the big blind almost never raises your limps and calls with anything, limping becomes viable with speculative hands that play well in limped pots (small pairs, suited connectors).
However, even this strategy should be used cautiously. Against even moderately aggressive big blinds who raise limps at reasonable frequencies, you should revert to a raise-or-fold strategy from the small blind.
Building Better Preflop Fundamentals
Eliminating these five mistakes will immediately improve your win rate and set you up for more profitable postflop play. However, understanding the theory is only half the battle—you need repetition against realistic opposition to develop the intuition that makes optimal play automatic.
Use FlopMAX's Play Mode to drill these adjustments until they become second nature:
- Practice your early position opening ranges against the range grid visualizer
- Experiment with medium pair defense strategies against different 3-bet frequencies
- Test various opening sizes against custom bot personalities that mirror your actual opponents
- Use the Insights button to verify your big blind defense frequencies match optimal ranges
The Sequencer Tool allows you to walk through complete preflop decision trees, observing how ranges interact across different positions and action sequences. Understanding not just what to do, but why you're doing it, transforms mechanical execution into strategic mastery.
Master preflop, and the rest of your game follows naturally. Make mistakes here, and no amount of postflop skill can compensate.