Starting Hand Selections - Varying Schools of Thought

I'm just putting it out there to see what you all think of this. What school of thought for starting hands do you find to be better? Sklansky's simplified approach from Small Stakes Hold Em or Hilger's more complicated approach from Internet Texas Hold Em. It seems that Hilger recommends being a little more tighter as well as having requirements for having a certain number of players enter the pot to play a number of hands. Thoughts?

i thinke Hilger's approach has a lot of merit, but in reality it's too much effort to evaluate starting hands with so much complexity day in- day out.

I like Yao's starting hand guide in Weighing the Odds. After a few thousand hands we/you shouldn't be locked into these hand charts.

[I am fish]

Don't worry so much about preflop. The recommendations aren't that different. Play tight up front, looser in late position. Don't cold call raises with medium strength hand... etc.

Focus more on the flop and the double sized bet streets.

In general play less hands in limit hold em pairs prefer many opponents and hands like AQ prefer less. Those other posters are right about focusing on the later streets...

Example 10-20 limit hold em standard rules of 1 bet and 3 raises a round.

I will MAX each round for the sake of exemplifing exactly enough about postflop preferences

Preflop 4SB
Flop 4SB
Turn 8SB
River 8SB

Maximum total 24
SB preflop is 4 SB so 4/24 so

PREFLOP is only 16.67% of total max action

Sure my example is somewhat contrived because hands do not play out like this and certian poor preflop decisions can trap you for more bets in the later streets but it shows the point of Preflop Pittiance. Focus on the postflop

Pack

[I am fish]

I'm not saying that preflop play is not important. It is especially important to gain a good foundation of preflop play when first starting out. I am just saying to be careful to not get boggled down in the differences between the books mentioned, because they are generally pretty similar. Once you get a vibe of what's correct in reading those books... focus your attention on the other streets.

I say this because when I first started, I spent waaaay too much time working on preflop... and it wasn't till I moved forward that my results really improved.

[I am fish]

Also, I think Yao's book does a good job in describing how the hand values preflop are not static... and that values change depending on the situation.

Ex... Yao's discussion of ATo vs T9s etc

It's nice to have preflop charts, but it is more important to realize why specific hands are recommended in certain situations while others are not. With the charts, think about why the suggestions on how to play are the way they are.

[jakethebake]

[ QUOTE ]
It's nice to have preflop charts, but it is more important to realize why specific hands are recommended in certain situations while others are not. With the charts, think about why the suggestions on how to play are the way they are.

[/ QUOTE ]

Ed says this explicitly in SSHE. I think he also says that asking questions like the one in this post are a waste of time.

You may find this thread (http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=1767198&page=0&fpart=1&v c=1&nt=13) interesting. I just stumbled across it myself.

[Rudbaeck]

It very nearly doesn't matter. Hilger does however have a costly flaw in his chart. I'll leave it up to the reader to figure out what it is. As a hint, Feeney has an entire essay on why that hand shouldn't be played like that.

While there are no numbers in the chart in SSH on how many callers you want, they are in the preflop chapter. Got to read that pesky text as well I'm sorry to say.