Advice for a beginner?

What range of cards? Like 35 percentish? You need to play rather loose on the button.

VPIP 25% is fine

Slow-playing big pocket pairs? You have good cards, why not put money in the pot? If you bet and people check through, that's a pot of 2.5BB. If you bet 3BB and BB calls, that's a pot of 6BB, and you're playing with 140% more money. More money is good.

Not only that, if you're calling with gold like AA-QQ, what exactly are you raising with? Probably stuff like AK-AJ and lower pocket pairs. Now imagine somebody figures out you're slowplaying your high cards, and starts 3betting you agressively, they're going to absolutely screw you over and force you to fold away your hands because you will never punish them because you will never have a hand you can call or 4bet them with. Now imagine they see you call, what are they going to do, they're going to check in every found of betting and fold at the earliest oppertunity, and you will both be getting less value out of your aces AND less value out of the rest of your cards. You want a raising range that puts people on edge and makes them wonder if you're firing air, semi-bluffing, or are holding gold, and slowplaying high pocket pairs doesn't do that.

Now obviously, slowplaying AA should be done on occasion, but you need to think of it as a -EV play that you have to make +EV by exploiting the stupidity of those around you. Like say you're playing a loose-passive table with a maniac to your left and everyone is 100BB deep, and you have a tight image because you have a maniac to your left. You limp in, let the maniac raise, let other players that wouldn't call you call the maniac, and then you make a smallish raise, and everyones in trouble. You should only slowplay if you can pull crap like this.

/r/poker Thread