GTO Preflop Hands by Position: What to Play and When

There is no list of hands you should play preflop. There is a list for each seat, against each action, at each stack depth, and those lists differ enough that treating them as one is the single most expensive habit in preflop poker.

That sounds like a dodge. It is not, and this piece is about why: what actually determines the answer, how the ranges move as you change seats, and where the money is lost. If you want the hand grid itself explained first, start with how to read a preflop chart.

Three things decide every preflop hand

Before any specific holding, understand the inputs. Every preflop decision is a function of these, and changing any one of them changes the answer.

Your position. Not just for the postflop advantage, though that matters. Position determines how many players are still behind you with a chance to wake up with something better. Under the gun in 6-max, five players can. On the button, two can, and both of them are paying blinds.

The action in front of you. Opening into a folded pot, calling a raise, three-betting, and facing a three-bet are four different problems. A hand that is a comfortable open can be an easy fold to a raise from a player who has already shown strength.

Stack depth. Deep stacks reward hands that flop well and can win big pots, because there is more money behind to win. Short stacks reward raw equity and fold equity, because the hand is often over before or on the flop. At the extreme the whole decision collapses into all-in or fold.

Everything below is the interaction of those three. Notice what is absent from the list: the raw ranking of your two cards. That is an input, but it is the least informative one, which is why hand-ranking charts and solved strategy charts are answering different questions.

Opening: how the range widens

When the action folds to you, your range is a raise-or-fold decision, and it widens predictably as position improves.

Under the gun is tight. Five players remain, and any of them can have a hand that dominates yours. The range is built from premium pairs, strong broadways, and the best suited aces, and it folds the large majority of the deck. Players who open too wide here bleed money slowly and consistently, because the punishment arrives from a strong range and you are playing out of position for the rest of the hand.

Hijack and cutoff breathe. Players have folded, fewer remain behind, and the range expands to take in more suited connectors, suited gappers, weaker aces, and offsuit broadways. The cutoff is a noticeably bigger step than the hijack, because a steal succeeds far more often one seat from the button.

The button opens the widest range at the table, and correctly so. Only the blinds remain, and you are guaranteed position after the flop. But widest is not "any two cards." There is still a boundary, and hands past it lose money even on the button. In a raked game the boundary sits a little tighter than a rake-free chart would suggest, because the button pays rake too.

The blinds are a separate problem. The small blind facing only the big blind plays a distinct raise-or-complete strategy rather than a normal opening range. The big blind never opens at all; it only responds. So the four true opening seats in 6-max are under the gun, hijack, cutoff and button, and the blinds get their own trees.

For the position-by-position detail at 100bb, 6-max cash RFI ranges by position covers each seat.

Facing a raise: where hands quietly die

This is the part players underrate. Once someone has raised, the set of hands that continue profitably shrinks hard, and it shrinks in a way that is not intuitive from hand strength alone.

The clearest example is a dominated broadway. KTo from the cutoff is a fine open in a 6-max game. Facing an open from under the gun, it is a fold, and it is not close. Nothing about the cards changed. What changed is that the money is now going in against a range built from exactly the hands that beat it: better kings, aces, and pairs. A hand that wins by being ahead of a wide random range loses by being behind a narrow strong one.

Your options facing a raise are three-bet, call, or fold, and the split between them matters:

• Three-bet with hands strong enough to want a bigger pot, plus a selection of bluffs chosen for blocker value and playability rather than raw strength. This is why suited wheel aces show up in three-betting ranges while stronger-looking offsuit hands do not.
• Call far less often than instinct suggests, and almost never from a seat where you would still have players behind you. Cold-calling invites a squeeze and caps your range.
• Fold most of what you would have opened. That is not weakness, it is the correct response to being second to act.

Rake sharpens all of this. Every pot that reaches a flop is taxed, so the marginal calls that were barely profitable in a rake-free solve fall out. The Simple GTO cash ranges are solved on the 500z rake structure for that reason, and how rake changes preflop ranges shows how far the effect reaches.

Sizing is part of the strategy

Which hands you play and how much you bet are not separate questions. The range is solved for a specific sizing, and changing the size changes which hands belong in it.

The Simple GTO 6-max cash trees open around 2.5bb at 100bb. Three-bets run roughly 3.4x the open in position and 4.4x out of position, the difference being that without position you charge more to offset the disadvantage. Four-bets come in around 2.3x in position and 2.75x out of position at that depth. Those numbers move as stacks change: by 60bb the opening size drops and the four-bet is frequently all-in instead.

Tournaments differ again, because the 12.5% ante inflates the pot before anyone acts. More dead money means steals need to work less often to profit, so opening ranges widen across every seat compared to a cash game at the same depth.

More on this in preflop raise sizing.

What stack depth does

Stack depth reorders which hands are good, not just how many.

Deep, at 150bb to 200bb, hands that flop big gain. Suited connectors and suited aces are worth more because there is enough money behind to justify chasing the hands they make. Offsuit broadways lose ground: they make top pair with a mediocre kicker, which is exactly the hand you do not want to play a huge pot with.

Around 100bb, the standard cash reference point, the tree is at its most complete. Opens, three-bets, four-bets, five-bets, and full blind-versus-blind play all exist.

Short, from roughly 40bb down, the tree starts collapsing. Four-bets become all-ins. Implied odds evaporate, so speculative hands lose value and raw equity gains it. Suited connectors, so strong deep, become some of the first hands to fall out.

Very short, from about 20bb down in tournaments, opening becomes a mix of small raises and open-shoves, and by 10bb it is all-in or fold. At that point the strategy is a solved table you can memorize outright, which is why short-stack work has such a high return. Short-stack poker at 10bb to 20bb covers the transition zone.

The hands people get wrong

A few recurring patterns, each costing more than it looks.

Offsuit broadways from early position. KJo and QJo feel strong and are not. They are dominated by the exact hands that continue against an early-position open, and they play badly out of position.

Small pairs at the wrong depth. Small pairs want deep stacks and multiple opponents, because they are drawing to a set and need to get paid when they hit. Short-stacked and heads-up they lose most of their appeal.

Suited aces treated as one group. A5s and A9s do different jobs. The wheel aces have blocker value and can make straights, so they show up as three-bet bluffs. The middle suited aces are more often calls or folds. Grouping them wastes the distinction the solve is making.

Any two suited cards. Suitedness adds roughly a few percent of equity. It is a real bonus and it is not a license. 72s is still a fold from every seat.

Playing a hand the same way from every seat. The most expensive habit on this list, and the one all of the above are symptoms of.

What "GTO" adds to hand selection

A hand-ranking chart tells you AA beats KK. That is a fact about showdown, and it is not a strategy. It does not tell you whether to open QTs from the hijack, whether to call or three-bet A5s against a cutoff open, or where your button range stops.

Solved output answers those, and it does it by accounting for things raw strength cannot express: how well a hand realizes its equity out of position, what it blocks in your opponent's range, how it performs against the specific range that continues against you, and what the rake or ante does to marginal spots. That is why two hands with nearly identical raw equity get treated completely differently.

It also gives you frequencies rather than verdicts. A hand on the boundary is not "in" or "out"; it is played some percentage of the time, and that percentage is information a simplified chart discards.

Where to start

If you are building this from nothing, the order that pays fastest:

1. Opening ranges, one seat at a time. Learn the boundary, the weakest hands still opened, and reconstruct upward. Everything clearly above it is in.
2. Facing a raise from the seats you actually face raises in. This is where the losses are.
3. Blind versus blind. It is the most frequent spot in the game and the one most players have never studied.
4. Then stack depth, working outward from your usual buy-in.

Trying to memorize all 169 cells for every spot is hopeless. Learning boundaries and the tiers that get added seat by seat is not, and how to memorize preflop ranges is the method.

Get the exact ranges

The shape here you can carry in your head: tight early, wide late, most things fold to a raise, short stacks simplify. The money is in the edges, and the edges are exactly what a rule of thumb cannot give you. The GTO charts show the full solved preflop tree for cash and tournaments as live grids with real frequencies, every position and every stack depth.