A note on my focus towards preflop strategy

Most written preflop strategies are catch-all strategies that assume a game with a light rake, like the 5% $3 max rakes you see online or the middle and higher limit games where even a sizable rake has negligible impact on pots. Given most players nowadays play online, little consideration is given to the higher rakes of live play.

However, in most cardrooms offering $3/$6 limit hold'em, the rake composes a much larger portion of the pot, often more than 10% of the overall pot. Most strategies don't take into account these conditions in determining optimal strategies because most of the players and authors who write these strategies don't typically play in such environments. The strategies they compose work great online or in middle to higher limit games.

When experts find out that more than 10% of the pot is taken away from a low limit game due to rake, jackpot drops and toke... most either throw their hands up and declare such a game unbeatable without a second thought, or state that such a game is beatable only when conditions are very loose, with an uncanny number of players seeing the flop and playing passively postflop.

Nowhere in these materials will you find consideration of the effect of the rake, drop and toke on each starting hand's expected value given these different pot-sapping conditions. In this project's goal to devise an optimal strategy for these games, I realize the key will be to closely examine the expected value of every possible recommended hand in each position, as well as other marginal hands not recommended, to find out which hands truly retain value in these different playing conditions.

Once I determine which hands play profitably given a solid strategy, then I can focus on expanding my research to postflop considerations, how hands are typically played, and whether postflop strategy can be altered to improve profitability, perhaps even make some unprofitable hands profitable.