UTG open range

It looks fine, but mate, unless ur playing in the high stakes games, using a balanced opening range will make you miss out on loads and loads of money!!

The best range to use depends on the villains left to act, or on population tendencies:

In lower stakes games you will often want to take some of those weaker Axs hands from your range as you face many calling stations. Tightening up isn’t always right though, if your playing at PokerStars in the micros/low stakes, you may want to widen your range adding more improving hands.

You’re going about this the wrong way... you don’t want to learn the correct strategy, as this does not exist. Instead of learning some strategy, you want to learn how to strategise so that you can effectively design your own strategies.

Do you have Equilab?

In the hand range selection dialogue you can see that a very similar range is labelled "Loose"
As you can see, it represents 10.1% of hands.

For comparison, the UTG "Tight" range is 3.7% and the "Standard" is 5.2%

Interestingly, the range you gave: 66+, A9s+, A5s, KTs+, QTs+, JTs, T9s, 98s, AQo+ is also 10.1%

If you consistently play 10% UTG you will need to deal with more 3Bets, and you'll also need to be playing a lot more hands post-flop.

So adjust your play to the table dynamics.

If your post-flop game is very good, playing more hands is a plus.

Best of luck,
VS

Thank you very much.:f_thumbsup: Yes i have Equilab. I usually play tighter range UTG than the one i posted, it got me thinking though because it is quite wide and because of the way it is constructed. For example i find it really strange that A9s is there, not that i am a poker pro or something but that hand looks to me like a lot of trouble. Even if theoretically we decide to open with 10%, wouldn't it be nice to replace that A9s with something else?

Blockers are important to GTO so the Ax does appear more often than is rational.

In real life poker hands you would almost always prefer 22 instead of A9s preflop. It plays much better.

the given range is too tight and not well constructed.

containing so many PPs, you will be forced to XF on so many boards. you will never have any straight on a low board and you will have too few flushes as well.

instead you will be oversetted a lot.

so get rid of the low PPs and add more suited aces, connetors and broadways and you will have better board coverage.

He said 66+ and you want him to get rid of some of the lower PP’s!! This is very bad advice Pokemon. With those PP’s we don’t just check fold them when we miss...

When opening UTG our perceived range is very strong so you can pretend like you hit all the big boards and you’ll generally take them down anytime the villain has missed. If the villain hits these boards, we will probably hit it too, and so usually fight it out.

If a big board comes down and we cbet with an underpair we’re obviously in bad shape if he calls. However, we do still look strong so will often see a showdown where we could steal the pot from a missed draw. These two extra cards do also give us a 1 in 10 chance of destroying him with a surprise set too.

Those big strong boards are covered, we’re in good shape, having the odd 22 in our cbetting range makes little difference on these boards... but what about the lower boards?

If we take the lower PP’s from our range and the board comes 345, we almost never hit anything. What’s worse is we look like we didn’t hit so we basically have to just pass these pots over to the villain. On every 445 board, every 224 board, we can’t have the nuts so a good villain will take us off these pots. Instead of fighting for them we’re usually better off just handing these over too. If we take the low PPs out of our range it’ll be easy to rinse us on all low boards.

You might think having overpairs on low boards helps but this is something of an illusion. We will burn redline on all kinds of turn and river cards. An overpair on a wet low board oop sucks.

Having SCs does help, but these come up very rarely and often fail to hold up.

Now, let’s say we do have the low PP's in our range, and we hit the ubernuts on 556ss, we are going to get action from all kinds of hands because we look like we never have the nuts. In said situation we can often abuse the villain.

When planning a range from any seat you always want as much board coverage as possible. I don’t know what the GTO bots are saying nowadays but I’m sure that 22 is in the GTO utg opening range at some percentage. You don’t need to play hands like 22 everytime, but it’s important that these hands are in their somewhere.

GTO only uses ONE range to cover a board: Our actual range. The GTO player designs an actual range that is balanced so they can cover as many potential future boards/actions as is safe to do so.

When exploiting we use two ranges to gain board coverage:

We use our actual range alongside our perceived range: If we look strong, we needn’t actually hold a strong hand as often as GTO states because the villain will fold more than GTO states. If we look weak, we don’t want to be weak as often as GTO states or we will miss out on lots of value.

As our perceived range is villain dependant, you can’t concoct the actual range you are going to use alongside it unless you are at the tables, but this is a massive and pointless task. If you’re exploiting, instead of considering your actual range you just consider your actual hand.

You look down at 55 and after taking everything into consideration simply guess whether you can make money off it. You hit a flop 1 in 7.5 times. Will the implied odds pay for the preflop bet? Will you even see a flop?

OP I think the charts you are referring to have implied odds in mind.

I think it's dependent on the table dynamics I wouldn't blindly follow any chart 100% of the time.The size of everyone's stacks is also very important.When you are deep stacked sometimes opening with suited aces ,A2s+ can be a fine play, but if you are short-stacked its can be an easy fold due to the lack of implied odds. Implied odds refers to how much you can potentially win from your opponent when you make a premium hand (I'm sure most of us know this, just saying it anyway). When the stacks are deeper you can play more speculative hands because when you improve to the nuts you have the potential to win a huge amount of money even though it will only happen occasionally.With small suited aces you can make nut flushes while another player can make a worse flush. Always need to keep in mind opponent player types and tendencies aswell, if you think your opponent will react with a 3-bet you may need to tighten your range. Stack sizes are vitally important because they can tell us how much we can potentially win if we make a huge hand.

a little wide for mi liking UTG fillring. If you are not too sure I would stick to the hand range from equilab as mentioned before