There are two ways to play these hands, depending on your tolerance for variance.

Some people recommend raising with these hands, either to take down the blinds or to get into a heads up situation where these hands perform best. I’m certainly not going to say that those people are wrong.

My problem is that whenever I do this, there always seems to be an ace or a king on the flop, at which point I inevitably end up folding. I appreciate this may be weakness on my part, but I suspect that lots of other low stakes players share this weakness.

So if you fall into that category, my advice is to treat these hands the same as small pocket pairs (see the next section) and limp in, with the sole exception of when they are overcards to the flop. If there are callers and an ace or king hits the board, you pretty much know you are behind – at least it didn’t cost you much to find out. Otherwise you have a good chance of being ahead. Having said that, I still don’t like big pots here, and if you don’t raise you let everyone else draw against you. I tend to put in a medium raise for information purposes but remain prepared to fold to aggression.

Sometimes, I will fall into a middle ground. I will put in a moderate pre-flop raise to test the water. If someone calls I figure they have an ace or a king and I will be aggressive with a rag flop, but to be honest they could still have a set or maybe become married to their AK.

If you don’t like difficult decisions, remember the Set and Above rule. QQ is not more likely to reach a set than 22 is, so treat them broadly the same.