What Home Game Habits Really Cost: Nine Preflop Leaks, Priced

Every home game has its regulars. There’s the player who calls any raise with two cards of the same suit, because “they’re suited.” There’s the one who never folds once he’s raised: “I’ve already put money in.” And there’s the one who folds his big blind to every raise unless he’s holding a real hand.

Everyone at the table has an opinion about which of those habits costs money. We wanted numbers. So we took nine habits we see at home games all the time, turned each one into an exact rule for how a hand gets played, and priced it against the same six-handed solution Poker Sense grades your preflop decisions against.

Here’s what each one costs, how we measured it, and the one big caveat to read before you quote any of it at your next game.

The Short Version

Costs are in big blinds (bb), the size of the larger of the two forced bets, poker’s standard unit. At a $1/$2 game, a big blind is $2. “Per 100 hands” means per 100 hands dealt to you at a six-handed table. The last column is what the habit costs on average each time it actually changes what you do, and every “each time” figure in this post is an average like that: single hands cost more or less.

Habit	Lost per 100 hands	Each time it changes your play
Playing any two suited cards	3.24bb (±0.05)	0.26bb
Playing any Ace	1.62bb (±0.04)	0.30bb
Never folding to a 3-bet	0.66bb to 1.89bb	1.13bb
Folding the big blind without a strong hand	0.80bb (±0.01)	0.30bb
Opening from the first two seats as if on the button	0.78bb (±0.06)	0.11bb
Folding to every 3-bet without Queens or better or Ace-King	0.46bb to 1.01bb	1.16bb
Waiting for a strong hand on the button and in the small blind	0.43bb (±0.03)	0.13bb
Just calling a raise from the small blind	0.27bb (±0.01)	0.32bb
Never 3-betting without Queens or better or Ace-King	0.09bb (±0.02)	0.04bb

The number in brackets is one standard error, a measure of how far the estimate could be off, and the next section explains it and the two rows with a low and a high figure. Some of the habits overlap, since a suited Ace is both suited and an Ace, so don’t add the rows together.

How We Priced Them

Poker Sense grades your preflop decisions against a solution for six-handed poker with 100 big blinds in every stack and no rake, the cut a cardroom takes from each pot. It was built by a solver, a program that works out a balanced strategy nobody can beat, and our post on solvers explains how that works. For every starting hand at each decision before the flop that it covers, the solution records two things: how often it takes each action, and what each action is worth. That worth is the action’s expected value, or EV: the average result of making that decision, in big blinds, over every way the rest of the hand can play out.

That makes pricing a habit simple arithmetic. We wrote each habit down as an exact rule: which hands move from which action to which. “Plays any Ace” means that every hand with an Ace in it that the solution folds gets raised or called instead. For each of those hands, the cost is the EV of what the solution does minus the EV of what the habit does. Then we averaged over the hands that reach each spot, weighted each spot by how often it comes up at a six-handed table, and reported the result per 100 hands.

Three things about the method are worth knowing.

Each habit is priced on its own. The habit changes one decision. Everything after it, for you and for everyone else, is played the solver’s way. Real players who have one of these habits usually have a few others too.

Every EV has a standard error. The solution’s EVs come from simulation, playing each hand out at least 10,000 times, so each one is an estimate, and its standard error says how far off it could be. We report a habit only when its cost is far bigger than that, and every habit in the table costs at least six standard errors.

Two of the habits get a low and a high estimate. A 3-bet is a re-raise: the third bet of the hand, counting the big blind as the first. The solution tells us how often the big blind 3-bets your raise. It doesn’t include what the players still to act do after a 3-bet from any other seat, so for those spots we only know an upper limit on how often they come up. The low estimate counts the big blind’s 3-bets alone. The high estimate counts every 3-bet at its upper limit. Both have standard errors of 0.01bb or less. The each-time figure next to them is for the big blind’s 3-bets.

The Big Caveat: A Balanced Opponent

Every number here is what the habit costs against an opponent who plays the solver’s strategy and never adjusts to you. Nobody at your home game plays like that.

That matters. Against a player who calls everything, some of these habits cost less and some cost more, and changing your play to take advantage of a particular player’s mistakes is a whole subject of its own, covered in our post on GTO vs exploitative poker. Read these numbers as the price of each habit against strong, balanced play. That’s a fair measure of how far a habit pulls you away from good poker. It isn’t a forecast of what the habit will cost you on Thursday night.

The Habits, One by One

Playing Any Two Suited Cards

The habit: when everyone before you has folded, you raise every suited hand, and when one player has raised and everyone else so far has folded, you call with every suited hand the solver would fold.

The cost: 3.24bb per 100 hands, the most expensive habit we priced. It changes your play about 12 times in every 100 hands, at 0.26bb a time.

Being suited is worth something. As our post on suited vs offsuit hands explains, it adds a few percentage points to a hand’s chances, and that’s enough to turn some borderline hands into good ones. It isn’t enough to turn Nine-Three into a hand. Most of the cost comes from calling raises: calling a raise with a suited hand the solver folds costs 0.42bb on average, and raising one when everyone before you has folded costs 0.16bb on average.

Playing Any Ace

The habit: when everyone before you has folded, you raise every hand with an Ace in it, and when one player has raised and everyone else so far has folded, you call with every Ace the solver would fold.

The cost: 1.62bb per 100 hands, at 0.30bb each time it changes your play.

The trouble with a weak Ace, like Ace-Four offsuit (the two cards in different suits), is the other Aces. When you make a pair of Aces, a player who raised often has a better Ace, Ace-Queen or Ace-King, and the pair you were hoping for becomes the hand that costs you the most. Again, calling is the expensive part: calling a raise with an Ace the solver folds costs 0.52bb on average, and raising one when everyone before you has folded costs 0.11bb on average.

Never Folding to a 3-Bet

The habit: you raise, one player re-raises and everyone else folds, and you always at least call. “I’ve already put money in.”

The cost: 0.66bb to 1.89bb per 100 hands, and 1.13bb each time it changes your play against the big blind’s 3-bet.

The chips you raised with aren’t yours any more. They’re in the pot whatever you do next, and the only question is whether calling the 3-bet makes money from here. With the weaker hands you raise with, it doesn’t. Depending on who raised and who 3-bet, a call the solver wouldn’t make costs from 0.63bb to 1.66bb on average. It comes up less often than the habits above it in the table: the big blind 3-bets your raise about once in every 100 hands.

The habit: in the big blind, when one player raises and everyone else folds, you play only the hands the solver raises at least half the time from the first seat to act, called under the gun (UTG), and fold everything else.

The cost: 0.80bb per 100 hands, at 0.30bb each time you fold a hand the solver would play.

The big blind has already put in a whole big blind before the cards are dealt, so calling a raise there costs less than anywhere else at the table. That’s why the solver plays so many hands from the big blind, and it’s the point of our guide to the blinds. Against a raise from the button, every hand you fold that the solver plays costs you 0.26bb on average. Against the small blind’s raise it’s 0.44bb.

Opening From the First Two Seats as if on the Button

The habit: from the first two seats, under the gun and the hijack (the seat after it), you open, making the first raise when everyone before you has folded, exactly as the solver does from the button, the seat that acts last after the flop.

The cost: 0.78bb per 100 hands, but only 0.11bb each time.

Each time, that’s one of the cheapest mistakes in the table, and one of the most frequent: it changes your play about 7 times in every 100 hands. An extra-loose raise from an early seat rarely loses much on its own. It’s a small leak you hit every orbit, once around the table, and that’s how it adds up to most of a big blind per 100 hands.

Folding to Every 3-Bet Without Queens or Better or Ace-King

The habit: the opposite of never folding. You raise, one player re-raises and everyone else folds, and you fold everything except Aces, Kings, Queens and Ace-King.

The cost: 0.46bb to 1.01bb per 100 hands, and 1.16bb each time against the big blind’s 3-bet.

Each time it happens, folding too much to a 3-bet costs about as much as calling too much. If you’ve been folding your Jacks to every 3-bet because “they always have it,” the solution doesn’t agree: it never folds Jacks to a 3-bet, whichever seat it comes from.

The habit: when everyone folds to you on the button or in the small blind, you raise exactly as the solver does from under the gun.

The cost: 0.43bb per 100 hands, at 0.13bb a time.

On the button, only the two blinds are left to act behind you, and in the small blind only the big blind is. A raise there takes the pot right away often enough that plenty of ordinary hands make money, and folding them while you wait for something better gives that away. As our post on position explains, the seat matters as much as the cards.

The habit: in the small blind, facing a single raise with everyone else so far folded, you never re-raise. Every hand the solver would 3-bet, you just call instead.

The cost: 0.27bb per 100 hands, at 0.32bb a time.

Calling from the small blind gives the big blind behind you a cheap price to join in, and you’ll be first to act for the rest of the hand. A 3-bet makes the raiser pay to see a flop, and often wins the pot before one.

Never 3-Betting Without Queens or Better or Ace-King

The habit: facing a single raise with everyone else so far folded, you 3-bet only Queens or better and Ace-King, and you just call with every other hand the solver 3-bets.

The cost: 0.09bb per 100 hands, at 0.04bb a time. Small enough that it barely registers.

This one deserves a second look, because it isn’t telling you that 3-bet bluffs don’t matter. With most of the hands it 3-bets, the solver plays a mixed strategy: sometimes it 3-bets them and sometimes it calls. Against a balanced opponent, those two choices are worth almost exactly the same. The value of the light 3-bet is that it keeps you hard to read. At a real table, a player who only ever 3-bets Queens or better and Ace-King gets found out: once the table knows what his 3-bet means, they fold the hands that would have paid him off, and his best hands win less. Our method assumes an opponent who never adjusts, so it can’t see that cost. Your friends will.

Open-Limping: Expensive, but Not in the Table

Open-limping, just calling the big blind when everyone before you has folded, is the most common habit at any home game, and an expensive one. Against balanced play, outside the small blind, a limp is almost never worth as much as the better of raising and folding the same hand, which is why solvers that are allowed to limp first in so rarely do it there. That doesn’t mean every limp loses: limp a pair of Aces and you’ll usually still win money, just less than a raise would have won. Our post on limping explains why.

It isn’t in the table because its price depends on everyone else. What a limp costs comes down to what the rest of the table does next: who raises behind you, how many players call along, and how those crowded pots play out after the flop. Pots with three or more players are the hardest part of poker for a solver, and the solution Poker Sense trains on leaves the first-in limp out entirely, at every seat. With no EV for a limp, there’s nothing to subtract, and we won’t print a number we can’t back up.

What the Numbers Say

Small and frequent costs more than big and rare. Each time it happens, never folding to a 3-bet costs more than four times as much as playing any two suited cards. But the suited habit changes your play about 12 times in every 100 hands, so even the 3-bet habit’s high estimate, 1.89bb per 100 hands, is well below the suited habit’s 3.24bb. At $1/$2, 3.24 big blinds per 100 hands is about $6.50 every 100 hands.

Calling costs more than opening. For both suited hands and Aces, most of the cost is in calling raises, and on average each call costs two to five times what each extra open does. When everyone before you has folded and you raise, everyone behind you can fold too. When you call a raise, you’re putting money in against a player who has already shown strength.

Both directions cost. Never folding to a 3-bet and folding to almost every one cost about the same each time. The fix for one leak isn’t the opposite leak.

Where Poker Sense Fits In

Every spot in this post, from raising when everyone before you has folded to facing a 3-bet, is one Poker Sense deals you in training, graded against this same solution the moment you decide. When a grade surprises you, tap “Ask Why,” and the coach explains why the solver plays that hand that way from that seat. Preflop training is on the free tier: 20 hands and 3 coaching conversations a day.

The Bottom Line

The habit that costs the most over a night is one you hit every orbit: playing any two suited cards. The habits that cost the most each time are the two about facing a 3-bet: calling too much and folding too much. And the habit that looks least balanced, never 3-betting light, barely costs anything against a balanced opponent. Its price gets paid at a real table, once your friends notice.

Every number here is the price against a balanced opponent who never adjusts, with each habit priced on its own. But if you’re going to fix one thing before your next game, make it this: when the solver would fold a suited hand or a weak Ace, stop calling raises with it.