These are ranges I use that have been profitable for me, as well as many of my students. These are ranges I’ve devised from my own play, as well as from fellow poker coaches and training sites. The open-raising ranges I recommend you start off with are conservative pre-flop opening ranges. Conservative Ranges to Keep You Out of Trouble This is why the BTN is the most profitable position in poker. As we move closer to the BTN, there are fewer people left to act, so we gain positional advantage and don’t have to worry about as many people calling or 3-betting us. Furthermore, the more people there are left to act, the more likely someone can call or 3-bet with a strong value hand. When we open-raise UTG, there are five people left to act in a 6-max game, with all but the SB and BB having positional advantage post-flop.

The reason for playing a tight range in early position is positional disadvantage.

As we move from early position to middle position and finally late position, we should loosen up our raising range, as seen in the figure below. When open-raising from early position, we should raise a tighter and stronger range of hands. There are five specific reasons why we raise rather than limp, which are the following: So, why do we raise? If the action has folded around to you and there are still players left to act after you, you should typically either raise or fold and never open-limp. I originally created this blog post in 2015 to provide conservative pre-flop ranges for beginning and struggle micro stakes poker players, including open-raising ranges, cold-calling ranges, and 3-betting ranges however, my advice on implementing those ranges has changed over the years, so I’ve decided to limit this blog post to focus solely on conservative open-raising ranges because open-raising is one of the most fundamental aspects of pre-flop poker that you should master.

Poker 3-bet chart