A starting hands excercise...

[henrikrh]

Ok, this is only really for players who are relatively new. This should help improve your preflop game and is easy to do in your spare time when not playing poker.

1.Get a deck of cards and deal out x amount of hands, 10 if you play full ring, 6 if you play 6 max, whatever you usually play.

2. Flip one hand over, then guess how good that hand is relative to the others (Best, second best etc.)

3. Flip over all the cards and see if you were correct

4. Repeat until you are correct often (variance makes it impossible to be perfect, sometimes J9 or something will be best) Try it with different amounts of hands as well.

This really helped me out early on and is especially good for people who are not mathematically inclined, thought obviously not nearly as helpful as a good book by Sklansky or Miller.

[PremiumHands]

I like the idea. From time to time I'll sit with a deck of cards and just deal 2 hands face up. Then I estimate the winning percentage for both hands. Then I deal the flop and reevaluate. Its a good way to get a quick feel for odds.

[Snoopy76]

This might be one of the more useful suggestions I have ever heard for beginners. Being that preflop play is the quickest way to improve your game and beginners have a warped sense of what a good starting hand is, this is a good excercise to develop a sense of reality. I would include however (though you're post may have implied it, and I missed it) that the person should deal out the board as well.

[Guthrie]

Excellent exercise. Since you already have the hole cards dealt, I'd suggest dealing the board and see what happens next. It will give you a feel for how easy it is for suckouts to beat your premium starting hand, and why post-flop play is so important.

[Doc7]

first time poster...

While I'm relatively new to playing poker for more than just fun with friends (Not professionally or anything, but playing money-tables online and playing in a live home game as often as I can attend, and trying to improve my game so as to at least be able to win moderate amouints consistently, spending-money)...I have a method of practicing knowing the strength of startings which also includes pre-flop play of other opponents...This is mostly for tournaments, but I think it can be applied to cash games as well, and I'd appreciate comments;

I have Dan Harrington's "Harrington on Hold'em Volume I". Many doggy eared pages after my 2nd read through it.

Page 179-195 discusses starting hand strategy in early-middle tournament stages. He includes 5 cases:
1) Nobody has entered pot yet (With analysis on early, middle, and late positions)
2) Player in 3rd position raised, you are in 5th, nobody else in pot yet
3)3rd position called, you are 5th
4) Raise and re-raise (I ignore this section; play AA KK QQ is all that is mentioned)
5) You are on button, with 3 limpers. (happens a lot online, as he mentions)

I havent practiced the number 1 case yet, but so far, here is how I practice case 2,3, and 5.

I shuffle the deck up, then I flip the top two cards over...If the top card is a diamond, I'm in case two (raise). If it is a spade, I have a caller (case 3), and if it is a heart I'm in case 5, with 3 limpers. If the top card is a club, the bottom cards suit determines it, but if they are both clubs the hand is "dead", i just discard it

I try to run through all 26 two-card hands in a deck in less than 2 minutes at the coffee table. I put folds to my left, calls in front of me, and raises to my right. After I finish the deck, i check any hands that I think I might have a chance of being wrong on. (I keep each two card pair together, with same top card, so I know what case it was when I was dealt it)

Once i take the time to learn Opening requirements, I'll do the same thing, using the suits as Early/Mid/Late position indicators.

What do you think of this?

Thanks very much!

[henrikrh]

Thanks for the support from the first few posters, and yes adding some flop play to the exercise would be good idea as well, if done over a long period of time. In the short-term new players could however see that the 46os which was the worst preflop would have flopped two-pair and that would weaken their preflop play, perhaps.

Doc7, I was a little bit confused by your exercise, isn't the suits selecting the scenario mechanism a bit superfluous to the exercise.

But the way I understand it is:

Your cards are A [img]/images/graemlins/spade.gif[/img] K [img]/images/graemlins/heart.gif[/img]
The [img]/images/graemlins/spade.gif[/img] mean this is the limper scenario, and therefore you should raise, because AK likely has a limper beat.

You could get more hands in if the hand wasn't dead when clubs came up, just going through the scenarios one by one, imo.

[Doc7]

Yes, but the reason I do it that way, henrikrh, is because you need to know all the situations like the back of your hand...If you practice "When 3 people limp" for 3 re-shuffles, by the time you are halfway through the first shuffle, you're no longer thinking to yourself "Three limpers" before you look at the cards, and simply doing the deal by rote, mindless.

I have it with the suits so I am having one situation after another thrown at me, which ensures that I know them all...Rather than doing 1 shuffle of each exercises, I do 3 shuffles involving all three, and thus I get the same amount of practice.

[FredBoots]

Another exercise I do is deal flop, turn, river and quickly identify the top made hands and top drawing hands as quick as I can. It helps me see where my hand is in relation to the potential best hand.

For example,
Qs Ts 4h
Best hands: QQ, TT, 44, QT, Q4, T4, Qx, Tx, 4x
Best draws: KsJs, Js9s, AsKs, Ks9s, 9s8s, any two spades, KJ, J9, AK, K9, 98 (some are missing here, but you get the idea)

[sfer]

It's easier to run sims on twodimes or pokerstove.