Experimenting With Starting Hands & Raise Sizes

Played for a few hours this morning over at the Guru's house, with both the Guru himself, and with Duffer. It was fun, and as usual, I came away from it with a few tweaks and improvements to apply to my game. I also came back re-energized to experiment with starting hand selection as a function of position. The Guru had suggested that I should be playing something like 4% in the UTG seat, and then 8% in the UTG+1 seat, 12% in the next seat, and so on. So I came back to my place and started mapping out this type of strategy, looking through HEM stats and playing with PokerStove. What I quickly discovered is that this approach would be too tight (given my style of aggressive play), and I'd probably be leaving money on the felt.

So, I tweaked around with this basic idea, trying different profiles of VPIP vs Position, and eventually I ended up with a trial starting hand range that began with 5% UTG, but then added 8% per position. This meant that I should be open raising as high as 53% of my hands on the button, which feels about right for a steal percentage.

I also made a (somewhat arbitrary) decision to start raising pot-size in the first two seats, 3x in the next three seats, and 2.5x in the last two seats. This approach is based on musings I've read by Chris Ferguson and other poker game theorists. I also decided to steal at 3x from the SB if it was folded to me, and I would use the button's 53% starting hand range to play from that position.


I fired up a couple of games of $25NL Rush and played a quick 350 hands in about 45 minutes using this approach. I was pretty careful not to call raises with trap hands and weaker aces, but otherwise I followed the plan very closely.

So, how did it work?

Answer: pretty good. In the end, I made a respectable $40 overall, which comes to an average win rate of $53/hour. My average VPIP for the session was 26.6%, with a PFR of 22.5%.  This felt pretty loose (and it was, but that was the point after all). It was also a little more passive than I would have liked, but I picked up a number of medium PPs in LP facing EP raisers, so I just set mined (and didn't hit any), so this is probably the reason my PFR was down a tick.

I'm encouraged by the results, but I have to remember that this is just 350 hands of data. More experimenting to come...

All-in for now...
-Bug