Poker Table Position: Playing Under the Gun on the Pre-Flop

Betting Strategy, Table Position
June 18 2008

Playing “under the gun” means that you are sitting in the first seat to act pre-flop. You will be seated to the left of the big blind, which is not a desirable place to be in a poker game. Careful hand selection must be practiced if you’re going to have any success from this position. Getting into a hand under the gun means that you will have to act early, and your opponents will have an advantage over you.

So you want to choose premium hands to play under the gun. Big pairs are good, and even

is a playable hand, but anything lower than that requires a bit of strategy on your part. With medium-strength hands like medium pairs and hands like

  or  ,

you have to come into the hand with a good-sized raise. You need to find out where you stand against the rest of the players that are after you in sequence. You will either pick up the pot right there, because opponents will know you’re on good cards because you raised under the gun, or you will get called and will need to hit the flop to continue.

When you have hands like

  or  ,

it’s a better play to limp in because you don’t want to scare off the action like you would with a medium-strength hand. Any hands that don’t fall into those categories should be folded because of the big positional disadvantage you’re in. You should only be playing about 10-15 percent of the hands from the under-the-gun position.

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