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In Poker, there are many tricks of the trade that people can employ in different playing situations, although not all of them have to be employed during the actual climactic parts of hands. One of the most important decisions that a poker player makes in a hand is whether or not they are going to stay in past the opening round of betting. This decision is arguably the most important on a per-hand basis and therefore coming up with different ways to approach the problem is always a constructive activity for a serious poker player.
A lot of starting hand guides gives you specific hands to go in on and specific hands to throw away, but what they don’t tell you is that there is a lot of grey area in the average poker game. You are probably always going to stay with the rockets and throw away the hammer in a game of Texas Hold ‘Em poker, but at the same time as you go down from rockets and up from the hammer, eventually you will hit that grey area where decisions become harder to make. Furthermore, the number and type of poker players will keep changing, meaning that the book will not always be correct in its estimation of the relative strength of a starting hand.
If you want to approximate the type of starting hand play that most books aim for, what you should really do is rank hands by strength and then play the top percentage of the hands that will have you playing a certain number of hands on average with each round of the table.
For example, playing tight usually equates to playing a hand once on every round. At a 10-person table, that means you need to play the top 10% of the strongest hands (i.e. 1 in every 10 hands). At a 9-person table, that means you need to play the top 11.1% of the strongest hands (i.e. 1 in every 9 hands). At a short-handed 6-person table, that becomes every 1 in 6 hands or approximately the top 16.7% of the starting hands. This example is simplistic, but sufficient to illustrate the point.
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