Please note this reality: if regularly one good hand is playing against 4 bad hands, bad hands will win more often than good hands. If the good hand wins one time in 4, he's still making money since he's getting 4:1 money for his 3:1 dog hand.


With more people in the average winning hand will increase. You generally, therefore, need to play hands that tend to make stronger hands, even if less often. This means play more suited hands (to make flushes) and pairs (to make sets). Play less unsuited hands. Unsuited connectors like 87 are still pretty weak.


In the loose games with few pre-flop raises, your actual play frequency will increase a lot (you can play 87s and 44 UTG). With lots of pre-flop raising your implied odds for your draw hands go drastically down making many unplayable, and therefore your play frequency will drop.


- Louie