Troubled Texas Holdem Hands

Playing way too many hands is a trademark rookie mistake. Even professional poker players can get caught playing too many hands when they get arrogant and think they can outplay every person at the table. Playing too many hands is a one way ticket to watching your chip stack deplete as fast as one of those growing plant films that are in fast motion.

What is exactly defines playing too many poker hands? It’s not just playing hands like 2 / 7 or 4 / 9 or low off suit cards that cannot connect. Plying too many poker hands extends all the way to hands like 8 / king or 10 / queen or your average hands.

The problem with playing with hands like 9 / King is that you are always getting dominated on the board. If a 10 / Jack / Queen comes somewhere on the board, you are totally dominated with Ace / King which is a hand that someone has every other dealt hand. You will lose more hands and more chips playing hands like this than any other hands because what you will find is that you will rationalize with yourself that you have the best hand on the table. You will say to yourself “what are the chances that this guy is holding the only two cards that can beat me” and you will convince yourself that he is trying to bluff you, when the fact is that the main reason he is still in the pot in the first place is because he actually does have the only two cards, or one card, that could take you down.

Even worse than playing questionable or borderline hands, is playing questionable hands when you are way out of position. Position is a key factor in the game of poker, and if you know your own poker game truly well, then you are probably going to be playing hands like 9 / king when you have good position, but even great poker players know that playing dumb hands out of position is plain stupid and not the correct way to play poker.

Troubled poker hands become terrible poker hands when you play them out of position. When you play a King / 9 out of position you are asking all of the people at the table that have an Ace or something simply better to take all of your chips. Nothing good can come out of this situation. You are one bluff away from folding your hand. For example, let’s say that the flop comes and you catch your king but the two other cards are duds? This leaves you in a huge predicament. If you are at a short table then you should be fine, but if you are in the table with a bunch of people, odds are that you do not have the best hand at the table and you will either be suckered into betting into a monster, someone will bluff you and take the pot down, or someone will get a good deal of chips out of you when they beat you with a King / 10 or better.

On the other hand, and you are in good position (on the button or one of the last to act) then this leaves you with some flexibility options like being able to bluff people and being able to intimidate people with the advantage of surprise. The bottom line is that you should fold as many trouble hands as possible because that limits your opportunities of losing your entire chip stack on a hand that you should not have been playing anyways.