What Almost Every Poker Author Gets Wrong About Starting Hand Selection in Texas Hold'em

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But that is directly the opposite of how hold'em players experiences multiple hands of poker. The dealer button moves clockwise each hand, and in each hand the action runs clockwise from the dealer button. After each hand, a player's position gets earlier and earlier. Rather than starting out tight and loosening up as one's position gets better, as the books recommend, a player following their recommended strategy should be playing more and more tightly as one's position gets worse and worse with each hand — until one takes the blinds and is rewarded with the dealer button and can open up one's play again.

The early-middle-late convention for outlining hand selection is an old, time-honored format. Bobby Baldwin's chapter in the original Super/System, originally published in 1978, follows the convention. I don't have a copy of it on hand to consult, but I recall John Fox's Play Poker, Quit Work and Sleep Till Noon (1977), about Gardena-style five-card draw, also followed the convention in its coverage of starting hand selection.

If I were to write a textbook about hold'em, which would surely include discussion of starting-hand selection, I would start with play on the button, and proceed through the earlier positions, just as players actually experience the situations about which they must make decisions.

[1] The significant exception is Gary Carson's The Complete Book of Hold 'Em Poker, which is a detailed discussion of what kind of hold'em hand is playable in what circumstance under various game conditions, and only at the end of the chapter does Carson offer a table of hands with which to open the betting under the gun.

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