I have a pretty solid grasp on online and even GTO RFI ranges.

UTG at a 9 player online table I'm using this range, which is a simplified GTO range for tournaments.




I feel this range would do pretty horrible against a full table of weak/passive/stations though?

Very likely to go to the flop OOP with 4-5 people and especially hands like AK/AQ/KQ hate this.
Even hands like KTs, QTs, how do you play these OOP in a big multi-way pot when you just hit TP?

But just making the range tighter seems bad, since it'll be extremely obvious what we're holding.
People can just fold to us if there's an A or a K on the flop and then just bluff us off most of our range when there's not.

While the people I'm playing are completely terrible at poker, they're not complete idiots and do have a lot of experience.
So they will take advantage of me only playing 5% of hands from EP.

How do we solve this?

If you don't tighten up though, not only will you lack card strength, you don't have position on your opponents. Meaning you'll have to rely on initiative and skill edge alone to turn a profit. The money made, of course, in each position is lower the further away you are from the BTN. After the blinds, UTG/EP is where you'll make the least amount of money. The most amount of money being made on the BTN. In UTG/EP, you simply have to tighten up, imo. There's no other way about it.

This range is already extremely tight though.
That's why I wonder what a tighter range would look like without completely giving away your hand strength.

Carefully. Playing these hands is a skill you will have to develop for playing live. The difference is that your not making your money from post flop play. Most of your money will come because you had 5 callers and there is already 25-30BB in the pot preflop, not getting villains to call bets with worse hands post flop. Because of that being obvious isn't as bad.

I would tighten up that range to a 10% or so range. Take out the A5s bluff, that sort of bluff is bad when villains are likely to flat call behind with AK/AQ. Instead mix in some suited conector and suited one gapper bluffs. With those hands you can get aggressive on a good flop and just give up if you have too many callers and whiff.

Even as a LAG you don't need to be that aggressive from EP at live low stakes. A lot more of your aggression will come from raising limpers and from taking down pots on the flop. A tournament range is too aggressive in this situation because the time limit forces more opening aggression and more bluffing in a tournament.

At my 10handed 1/3 NL table, my EP range is 77+/AQo+/ATs+/KQs (and at some tables I'm even dropping AQo/KQs). And I'm limping all of them. Lol @ me, ldo.

GcluelessEPnoobG

There are a bunch of things I could say about this, but maybe one place to start is here:

If you are at a table full of weak, passive stations, but you are comfortable opening with pairs down to 66, you probably should feel comfortable opening with the rest of the pairs too. Small pairs are the least affected by being out of position (whatever their other flaws).

Now you have an extra 24 combos in your range, and you probably should tighten it up by throwing out some of the suited aces and suited connectors.

Another question for you here is why you are folding hands like AJo and KQo (while still opening the suited versions). I think that if you think that through, you might be able to arrive at your own conclusions about what hands you want to be playing instead.

Disclaimer: I usually play a significantly wider range from UTG and depending on the table limp in a decent amount.

If you don’t want to play OOP 4-5way, the first thought should always go to raise sizing. If everyone and their mother calls a $15 raise at 1/3 and we don’t want that to happen, raise to $20 and see where that gets you. Depending on stack sizes that also might mean you need to play an even tighter range though.
It’s obviously not the golden age anymore and the average player has gotten significantly better but I believe there are still plenty of low stakes games out there that you can beat with the 2010 approach of opening a super tight range for 10-15BB from the first couple positions.

One of the most important things that a lot of people don’t consider when deciding which hands to open are stack sizes of what I would call “relevant” players. While every other player at the table matters, there’s a huge difference in relevance to us depending on if a person plays 10% or 50% of his hands.

I'd drop a lot of this: the lesser suited broadways (except maybe AJs/KQs) and T9/98s, as well as A9/5s; they're gonna be dominated too frequently by calling ranges. Vs still call with KQo, ATo, etc. these days. Maybe throw in 55.

But yeah, just play like a nit from EP.

here is the deal:

Play a couple of hundred hours of screw down poker from utg/ep. As you gain experience and understanding of your playerpool you can open it up. Looking for an auto formula of how to play from utg/ep you are going to get 10 different responses from 10 different winning players.

FWIW my UTG/EP openings will vary a fair amt based on the lineup and the various positions of player types in that particular lineup. So like all things poker related it really depends on what is going on at the table in determining what I am willing to open from ep. The only way to get an understanding for that is to have a general gameplan like you do and get into battle and see what works/doesnt for yourself.

Correct GTO tournament ranges should take antes and <100bb stacks into account, so using them for live cash games is usually not optimal.

In all fairness, this range seems reasonable. I'd argue at very passive/stationy preflop tables, you should exploitatively exchange some QT/T9/89s for lower PP, Axs and AJ/KQ, but the EV difference is probably marginal either way, particularly from UTG.

You say this like you have empirical evidence for it? Ime these ranges and hands absolutely print money vs weak or passive ranges. Seems much more a case of either a small sample size, an observational bias, or perhaps significant postflop leaks.

If you find you are losing money in these spots over a significant sample, imo you should put time into studying oop multiway pots, rather than adjusting your preflop ranges, which are per definition +EV when correctly solved, regardless of your opponents ranges.

Whatever EV you are leaving on the table by not exploitatively adjusting your ~10% RFI UTG range, must be crums compared to the EV loss of not being able to play AK/AQ/KQ profitably MW oop vs wide ranges, if that is indeed the case, OP.

Seems reasonable. My typical UTG range is a bit wider. I believe opening stuff like AJo/KQo is exploiting loose passive players who VPIP A7o and call multiple streets with top pair multiway. I probably open a few more suited hands and pocket pairs too.

I think it's wrong to tighten up against loose/passives because you're worried about multiway OOP pots. It's a disadvantage but you make up for it by having a strong range against whatever garbage ranges they have. I don't feel that uncomfortable with QTs UTG against 5 wide ranges. Being IP doesn't give them the ability to start VPIPing whatever they want against an UTG range.

There are some concerning replies in this thread that go against a lot I've learned and studied about poker.
Not sure why it got moved to beginner's questions because I don't feel like this is a beginners question.

Small pocket pairs are really not as good as people think, especially OOP.
Maybe this is just because GTO doesn't like playing them?

Suggestions like dropping A5s and 98s and instead adding KQo just make my issue worse?
The problem is people know what I'm holding and can just fold on any flop with an A or a K, removing more other cards and adding more K's isn't going to help?
Even worse, they can destroy me for value when they can beat TPTK on a board like that.

This is a 10% range btw, it's already crazy tight.

GTO values hands like A9s over hands like KQo, again, maybe it's not correct to play this way in live small stakes, I'm not sure.

These are 100bb tournament ranges, they don't take into account rake yes, but I doubt that changes much.
Accounting for rake might drop a few combos like A9s, 98s, 66? Or it might not?

I really don't know if I'm losing with these types of hands from EP, I doubt it.
Online my win rate has always been good from EP and I'm currently crushing the live games I'm playing, though over a very small sample.

I think I do feel uncomfortable playing very strong hands like AK maybe even AA/KK, definitely 99-QQ OOP, especially when 4-5 people call, which will happen a lot if you open from EP.
So working on my OOP play from EP might help.

I seriously doubt adding hands like AJo/KQo is going to increase your EV.
You might be up against 5 weak ranges, but the chance of one of them having something strong is pretty good, well bad for us.
And since these players are good enough to know I have a very tight/strong range, they won't pay me with worse hands, but they can easily get value from me with better.

I'm considering starting to limp, but I'd hate splitting my range in limp and RFI and I definitely don't want to start limping stuff like AK and JJ+ in these passive games.


I've noticed, for tournaments, there's very little difference between exploitative and GTO ranges for EP, especially UTG.
It's just hard to play more hands with that many people behind you.
Playing less hands just gives away your hand strength too much I think?

Maybe I'll just go find myself some cash game GTO ranges
They're probably not optimal for my games either, but at least it's a starting point.


A lot of different and contradicting replies in this thread as well, which doesn't help much.

I know of 5 rock solid winners that have posted in this thread

jus sayin

It's very hard to come to strong conclusions about marginal preflop hands because their EV relies on all the possible action sequences and postflop runouts. You also never really get a big enough sample to statistically determine whether or not near breakeven hands are profitable, or if you're just running good with them, and their profitability can change depending on game conditions.

I’m honestly kinda confused. The thread went from a very standard live small stakes situation (4-5 callers of our RFI) to others exploiting our tight / unbalanced preflop UTG range.

We play roughly 30 hands per hour which means a little more than 3 orbits. That’s not very many situations to find out if we play 10% or 15% of our hands from that specific position. Besides that, the standard assumption is that our opponents call way too wide because they are bad at poker not because they are amazing at finding exploits.

If our opponents are good enough for that, rake should definitely be a consideration in a small stakes game.

Yeah I realize that, that's what's makes this so confusing.
I appreciate the advice.


That is what the thread was supposed to be about, I did mention this in my OP.

Pretty much everyone I play against knows me and I have an extremely tight image because I play proper ranges, probably even a bit on the tighter side.

So with the range I mentioned, I'm going to make a ton of money if my A5s, 98s or one of the small pockets gets there. No one will see it coming.

But if I have an over pair or TPTK type of hand.
That doesn't do particularly well against 5 callers OOP.
And everyone at the tables knows I will have these hands a very large amount of the time.
So that opens me up to getting bluffed off hands like AK/AQ/KQ if there's no high cards on the board.
It also denies me value when there is a high card on the board.
What's worse is if someone hits better than TPTK, which will happen often in a 5 handed pot, they can easily take me to value town.

I'm not a bad post-flop player and I probably handle these situations quite well, since I am winning.


Maybe I should just increase my raise sizing from EP to like 10bb?

After sleeping on it for a night I guess my range is balanced enough, probably won't hurt much cutting hands like KTs, QTs, A5s and A9s from it either.


I wonder if opening all the small pockets is actually +EV against my player pool.
Gotta look into that!

I guess that's extremely game dependent.

One of the reasons why small pairs don't play well from EP in FR games (or even UTG 6max) against solid ranges is the risk of making second best hands even if you hit your set.

Playing 44 against the range in your OP where almost 40% of the hands in there are higher pocket pairs that can overset you is a problem. But if someone plays 50% of their hands, pocket pairs higher than 44 are less than 10% of that range.

If you are playing the same small pool of opponents enough that they can get a good handle on your range then you do need to adjust strategy a bit.

I would still go a bit tighter as a play all the time range. What you need is a range of hands you play sometimes to mix things up so that your opponents can't easily read your hand on the flop.

I would take A9s- and play them 1 time in 10 or so. That may not seem like much but there are a bunch of hands in that range. With AJs and ATs it depends on how much your opponents flat call with AK/AQ. If they usually 3 bet those hands then AJs/ATs are fine to open. If they like to flat AK/AQ then don't always open AJs/ATs.

What you don't want in this situation is fixing it at playing A5s as your ace bluff. Eventually somebody will realize that you range is more dangerous on an A53 flop then an A73 one.

Then figure out a range of suited connectors/suited one gappers/low pairs that you do the same thing with. Play them some percentage of the time so that you can connect with any board.

I would start with something like this and then tweak to suit. Sometimes play means 1/2 of the time and occasionally meaning 1/4 roughly. Roughly because your never going to hit this exactly doing it in your head and you should be adjusting on the fly based on table conditions.
Sometimes play KJs/KTs/QTs/JTs-87s/99-77
Occasionally play 76s-54s/K9s/J9s-97s/66-

Depends a lot on the game you're playing.

What tends to be the case across all LLSNL games I've played or am aware of is that players tend to call too often relative to 3betting. Some games play tighter, some games play looser, but facing more calls and fewer 3bets out of the continuing segment of opponents' ranges leads to one conclusion: you should raise larger when you do raise. Of course, this tends to mean that unless the game plays deep (not uncommon), you're getting a lower flop SPR than you're probably used to, which leads to the conclusion that when constructing a range, you should be more inclined to play hands that you will often flop moderately well (as with a lower SPR your stackoff threshold postflop should be lower, as should your opponents - diminishing the importance of barrelling outs being nutted).

As table VPIP increases or decreases, the portion of your EV which comes from folding changes in a very linear manner, which means you should consider more carefully the EV of any combo which is derived from facing a call.

I like this. I use certain suits when picking my 4! bluffs as well.

What sucks is I've had several sessions where someone mentions I haven't played a hand in forever, but usually I'm literally card dead or I'm trying to play a solid EP range.

I start raising middling pocket pairs or medium suited connectors and then I get stationed down by better pairs for example 66 < 99 or run into tight/nits playing AQ/AK passively etc.

Low stake live games can be easy printing money vs loose passive players, but if you're card dead... good luck.

My last live session last weekend I think I went like 3 hours before I saw my first premium. I wish I was exaggerating. Variance is a *****.