Avoid early-position raises with marginal junk hands

As I watched the final table of the World Series of Poker Main Event play out last month, it became clear that many of the players had an obvious, easily fixable leak in their strategy that might make it difficult for them to succeed in tournament poker over the long run.

Their mistake was simply that they raised from early position with far too many hands.

Once play began at the final table, within the first few hands three different players raised from early position with trashy holdings, the worst being Kd 6d. While it may be fun and make you feel powerful to raise with from early position with a mediocre hand, you must realize that you are taking your hand and playing it from out of position against the best of the remaining hands at the table.

If you think about this from a logical point of view, each of the players yet to act will have a premium hand 10 percent of the time. This means that if you are raising into six players, they will each not have a premium hand 90 percent of the time. You then multiply 0.9 by 0.9 five times to see how often one of the other players at the table yet to act will have a premium hand.

In this case, 53 percent of the time no one at the table will have a premium hand, which means that 47 percent of the time someone will have a premium hand, which would leave the junky early-position hand in awful shape.

While these percentages may not seem too bad, you must realize that in reality, the player in the cutoff seat and the player on the button can play far more than just premium hands due to their positional advantage. The big blind also gets to play a wider range due to getting better pot odds.

When you work out the math, the preflop raise from early position might only steal the blinds 15 percent of the time or so, which is not often enough to justify the early aggression. Do players actually think that they can profitably raise a marginal hand from out of position when they are likely to be in bad shape when they are called?

To make matters even worse, there were a handful of shallow stacks at the WSOP final table. On the first hand, a player raised Kd 6d and was pushed all in by the small blind, who was holding 8s 8c.

The initial raiser wisely folded, which may not have seemed too costly. However, if you consistently bleed off preflop raises by raising with marginal junk from early position, you will have a difficult time accumulating a large chip stack unless your opponents are especially tight and passive, which is rarely the case in an era where aggressive play is the norm.