Is this a "bad beat" or just poor playing ?

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Hey man, I want to say your honest attitude is perfect for becoming a winning player and that's great. There's some great strategy advice here already but I'm going to clutter up your thread anyways.


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With 66, should I even be raising? ... or even playing the hand for that matter?

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9-handed game, you are in worst position with 8 people to act behind you, 66 is simply not strong enough to open-raise. In this spot, I would open-raise JJ or better pairs, and AQs or better Aces. The raise would be about 3x the big blind, because min-raising only encourages people to come in with speculative hands to win a big pot. As long as the table is not super-aggressive (lots of raising) pre-flop, a limp is good, because you are risking 60 chips to try and flop a set and win a large pot with minimal chip risk.

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I've read different things some saying don't ever raise pre-flop unless you have AA, KK, AK, other things I've read have suggested if you're going to get into a pot, start with a raise to knock out anybody with marginal hands.

My "reasons" at the moment are a mixture of testing things that I've been reading, and a lot of guessing-hunches


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Great stuff, you just gotta try everything and see what works. As far as the raising only AA/KK/AK and such, everything in poker is so situational ie. number of players at the table, your position, looseness of the game, level of the tournament, etc.

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That's why I've been only playing freerolls, though I might start trying the penny-stakes stuff ... after a few more thousand practice / freeroll hands

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Best of luck dude, you gotta try it all and see what you like best