Hi coffeecup,

To be honest, I'm a little apprehensive about answering this question, because it's extremely general in nature, but also somewhat of an oversimplification of the game. It's very difficult to give anything resembling useful advice without making a lot of assumptions. Let me highlight why.

– I'm going to assume you're referring to ranges for open-raising. If you're thinking about three-betting or calling, the situation is even more complex and it becomes virtually impossible to offer any 'default' ranges.

– Every situation in poker is different. The stack sizes of the other players, stage in the tournament, buyin level, your ability, the opponents' ability, and many other factors should dictate how your open-raising range changes throughout a tournament, so the number of instances in which a 'default' range is actually useful will be very low.

– EP/MP/LP is too vague of a grouping system. UTG is different to UTG+1, and MP1 is different to MP2. The cutoff and the button are very different. And what about the small blind? How many players are at the table, is it a 6-max or full-ring tournament?

– There's a huge difference between having 50bb and having 100bb. Grouping those two together isn't very useful, and the same goes for 20bb and 50bb. A slightly more appropriate distribution might be 100bb+, 70-100bb, 40-70bb, 25-40bb, 15-25bb and 0-15bb, but even that's a little reductive.

– The closest we can get to appropriate 'default' ranges would be to use software that calculates the Game Theory Optimal opening ranges for every player at the table in a specific spot, but at deeper stack sizes, GTO calculations take a long time and are progressively less useful.

– The point made above about displaying ranges as percentages is a good one. You should try to get comfortable with this. Recognise also that 'the top 8% of hands' is a different concept from 'raising 8% of the time', for example – there are multiple different 8% ranges that someone could be using.

In terms of giving you an actual answer to a question, the best I can really do is offer the opening ranges that I would recommend a novice player to use at a deep-stacked, full-ring table (let's assume it's the first hand of the tournament – the later you get, the more stack sizes change, so giving default ranges for say, 40bb, would be reasonably useless if the rest of the table varied between 10bb and 100bb stacks), according to position – as your skill level increases you can think about widening these ranges, but to start out with, it's best to play fairly tight and avoid getting yourself into difficult spots postflop. The ranges I'm giving you here will be significantly tighter than what some GTO software will advise, but GTO is an advanced concept that you don't need to worry about much for now.

Here are the ranges:

UTG: 8% (55+, AJs+, AQo+, KQs, QJs, JTs)

UTG+1: 10% (44+, ATs+, AJo, KQs, QJs, JTs)

MP1: 11% (44+, ATs+, AJo+, KQs, QJs, JTs, KJs, KQo)

MP2: 13% (33+, ATs+, ATo+, 98s+, QTs+, KQo)

HJ: 15% (all pairs, A9s+, 98s+, suited broadways, KJo+)

CO: 21% (all pairs, A2s-A5s, A9s+, A9o+, 87s+, all broadways)

BTN: 33% (all pairs, all Ax hands, any two cards 9 or higher, 76s+)

SB: 47% (all pairs, all Ax hands, all suited Kx hands, any two cards 7 or higher)

Note: These ranges, as I said, are what I would advise you to open if you're a novice player with little experience of postflop play. They're tighter than what most good players should be opening in most positions – with the possible exception of the small blind. Small blind play is tricky and I've constructed a range here that doesn't allocate for the option of limping. As your game develops, you'll learn how to adapt these ranges to adjust for stack sizes and your opponents' tendencies. Hope that helps!