The concept of playing tight actually only applies to the overall percentage of hands you play. When you are first to act or are under the gun, you should play so tight that you only play around 5% of your hands. When you are in other positions, such as the button or the big blind, you can drastically expand that percentage. It is only the average that should be around 20%. Up front, almost no hand should look good to you unless it is A-Q or better or at least a 6-6 or better. The question becomes, “why so tight?”
There are many reasons to play super tight up front, but the one I want to focus on has to do with a decision-making disadvantage. When we play poker, we never want to lose sight of the fact that it is a game of decision making. If you are better at making those decisions than your opponents, you will win lots of money. The road to becoming the better decision maker is to wield the maximum amount of information available to you. In poker, this means using the information to narrow down the holdings of your opponents. And therein lays the problem with playing loose up front: You will always be acting with the least information available because you don’t know what your opponents are going to do after you. They, however, will always know what your action is when they have to act. They will have been able to watch you look at your cards. They will have been able to study your face, your body posture and the way you threw the chips in the pot when you acted. You will have none of that information if you play loose.