In the early stages of MTTs, these are very interesting and powerful hands to play. SUITED CONNECTORSĮveryone loves winning a hand with suited connectors, such as nine-ten of diamonds or seven-eight of clubs.

Your aim should be to build a stack and if you can get plenty of your chips against players who have taken big risks with lower-ranked hands, you’re going to be a winner in the long term. Playing premium hands is something that should be done with great aggression in the early stages. Getting pocket jacks when three-handed would be similar to like finding pocket kings in nine-handed play. Pocket jacks would be seen as a premium hand, but even more so at tables that are six-handed or shorter, such as the very final stages. The premium starting hands in poker are, generally speaking, known as pocket aces, pocket kings, pocket queens, and combinations of those cards such as ace-king or ace-queen. Pushing your opponents out of their comfort zone while they have the chips to lose can mean the difference between you going into the middle stages with a big chip stack or going home early. You need to know which players you can exploit and which hole cards you can use to carry out that exploitation. Playing these stronger hands in the early stages can be extremely lucrative, and identifying your opponents playing style is pivotal to how you can implement this plan. Premium Hands (Pocket aces, Pocket kings, Pocket queens).Two of the keys to starting a tournament strong are: playing strong hands and identifying your opponents playing style. So keep that in mind and look to protect your stack for the long road ahead. Lose a big chunk of your chips, and it can really put a damper on any late-stage ambition you had. The first few blind levels are, however, way more vital than they can sometimes appear. At the start of tournament play, the early blinds set the stage for gameplay to be more like a cash game, where more players will get involved with a wide variety of hands to build some big pots and get themselves into an early lead.

Top 10 starting hands in texas holdem