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Mar 03, 1999  If you ever wanted to know some of the odds and probabilities of Texas hold'em poker, from the chances of flopping a flush (0.8%) or set (12%) to the odds. The basic idea of poker is to play the strongest hands in early position, good hands in mid-position and a few more hands in the late (aka strongest) position. Over time, you'll naturally want to shake things up a bit. For now, stick with this and you'll never find yourself in trouble holding 7-2 off-suit. Jul 02, 2008 Find the best starting poker hands. Learn about poker starting hands and holdem starting hands. Get free tips on Texas hold em.

“I’m always looking for a reason to fold out of position.” -Dave Tuchman, Poker Commentator

“Never bring a knife to a sword fight.” -Mark “the Guru” Brement, Poker Coach

We’re told by the experts that a Tight-Aggressive (TAg) approach to poker is the foundation upon which beginners should build a winning strategy. But then in the very next breath, those very same experts tell us that every situation is different, and that a starting hand chart that defines the “Tight” part of TAg is a bad thing to use. They say that a newbie using a position-based rote-style hand chart to decide which hands to fold and which to play will hurt their game in the long run. When talking about hand selection, the experts always say things like “it depends” and every situation is different, which means an ever-changing range of hands to play for optimal results. In contrast, a starting hand chart will negatively affect your future ability to learn to hand read, they say. Starting hand charts are bad, bad, bad!

Bullsh!t Poppycock, I say. Starting hand charts won’t hurt your game—especially in the long run. In fact, learning to play via a chart can and will improve your overall game. In this post, I explain why a starting hand chart is not only a good thing for beginners to use, but should also be something old-timers occasionally employ to reset their game. In other words, why aren’t you using a starting hand chart?

The best preflop hand doesn’t always win, but this isn’t a reason to choose poor starting hands.

photo credit: The hand that beat my rockets via photopin(license)

The Problem Facing Newbie Players (and Oldies, too)

In my experience both playing and teaching poker, I’ve come to realize that beginning players are often overwhelmed by the action at a table. We tell them they need to estimate pot odds, be aggressive, fold trouble hands, embrace bad beats, and try to determine what kinds of opponents they’re facing. We tell them to count the pot and villain’s stack size, estimate implied odds, bet for value, and steal in late position. Bluff, we say, but not too much! Defend your blinds, but not always! And all along, we repeat, “Position, position, POSITION!!” Play aggressive, but above all, play tight in early position and loose in late position!

Ah, but then we refuse to tell them exactly what starting hands they should play in those early and late positions. It’s almost like we expect them to learn a basic starting hand strategy by osmosis. Or, worse, learn by expensive trial and error. Rather than be given some kind of initial guidance that bootstraps their play with safe, conservative advice, the experts instead proclaim that every situation is different, and you will hobble yourself if you learn from a rote list of starting hands. For this (dumb) reason, starting hand charts are regarded as evil incarnate by the “experts.” The professionals argue that you will never learn to hand read and make decisions based on your opponents’ cards if you’re rely on a chart.

I disagree. Strongly. While there is some truth buried in what they say, I believe the experts are missing the bigger picture, and in fact they’re actually slowing the learning process of a new player by eschewing hand charts. I’d go so far to say that many beginning players actually are destined to losing long term precisely because they aren’t using a solid starting hand chart. These player literally never are able to progress to proper hand reading because they themselves never mastered the basics upon which solid play is predicated.

The bottom line is this: newbies don’t have a prayer of learning how to hand read. Hell, they barely are able to remember when it’s their turn to act, let alone put players on ranges and adjust their starting hand selection accordingly. Beginners should not focus on hand reading—at least until they learn and master a number of other, more basic skills first. In my experience, beginners learn the most quickly, and become profitable faster when they are given good, conservative hand selection advice to build a solid TAg foundation upon. This frees their overwhelmed minds to focus on other, more important Level-1 skills. Once they master those skills, we can come back to hand reading and adjusting to all those “it depends” situations.

Good Habits, Bad Habits, And Learning Poker

Scientists used to think that the magic number was three weeks, but modern research now shows that it takes an average of 66 days of disciplined repetition before something new and beneficial like a morning exercise walk or eating lunches become a life habit and not a difficult chore. Bad habits and vices, however, like smoking, are adopted much more quickly. It takes time, repetition, and discipline to make a good habit stick, but only a few reps of a bad habit to get it to insinuate itself into our lives, especially if we are rewarded immediately for that bad action by something like the hit of nicotine in our bloodstreams.

It sucks, but this is our reality—for better or worse, we humans are programmed to adopt bad habits more easily than good ones. This is why it’s so easy to get into the routine of drinking a beer or eating a bowl of ice cream when we get home from a hard day’s work, and its so hard to instead stop on the way home at the gym to workout instead. The former is easy and instantaneously rewards us with a (temporary) feeling of a full, sated stomach; the latter is more difficult to do, and the payoff comes much later in the long run.

Okay, fine. What does this have to do with poker?

Answer: getting into the “habit” of selecting the correct cards to play preflop based on position is very beneficial in the long run, but it takes discipline and repetition to learn this habit. In contrast, playing a shiny-bright trap hand is easy, fun, and gives us the immediate feedback of action and excitement and a shot of adrenaline in the blood stream. It also occasionally pays off via a lucky flop, so our brains feel a double reward for the bad behavior.

Sound familiar? Getting into the habit of playing good cards—and folding the bad ones—is going to take some serious effort–around 66 solid days of disciplined practice before it has a prayer of becoming something you “just do” when you play.

Picking Up Good Habits By Example and Repetition

Some hands you are dealt get processed by your brain by way of what I call “autopilot” mode. For example, when you’re under the gun with 7-2 offsuit, most players, including the majority of beginners, automatically fold. Ninety-nine times out of a 100, this is the correct play and pretty much everyone does it. We all know to fold this kind of hand, so we do.

And when you’re dealt Aces in that same seat? Again there is a correct play (raise*), which again is done 99 out of 100 times by most people who have been around poker for even a little while. Hands like these are known by all of us to be super strong, and the standard, ABC plays we should make with them is to raise. Raising Aces and Kings are the default, standard “correct” play.

Fine. This isn’t really earth-shattering news. But ask yourself this: why do you automatically fold 7-2 offsuit, and automatically raise A-A UTG? Answer: you’ve likely read somewhere that 7-2 is the worst possible starting hand in poker,** and you also know that A-A is the best possible hand. Further, you have seen other, better players play these cards exactly this way. Then you started playing these cards this way, too, and now after a few thousand hands you “automatically” fold and raise them, respectively, when you they’re dealt to you. Said another way, you’ve picked up some good basic habits with 7-2 offsuit and A-A by way of example, discipline and repetition.

I want you to pick up this same type of habit with all those trouble hands you’re dealt in EP. I also want you to pick up the habit of opening up your game when you in LP. And I want to you to adjust in middle position and the blinds accordingly, too.

And the easiest way to begin doing this is with a set of starting hand charts. Every single time you play. For the next 66 sessions. Seriously.

The Charts

Over the next few installments of this series, I’m going to provide you with starting hand charts for early position (EP), middle position (MP), late position (LP), and the blinds. These are safe, conservative charts that my business partner, Le Monsieur, and I created last year as part of the development work we’re doing on a full-up poker training course.

We created these charts by analyzing of over three million hands of small and mid-stakes online poker data. These were hands that went to showdown and turned face-up. We also closely examined a few hundred thousand hands from my own poker database and compared and integrated the results with the 3M hands. We then applied an algorithm that determined relative hand strengths, as well as factored in things like how many players were left to act after you, the probability that at least one of these players were dealt a stronger hand than yours, and so on. We then set a minimum expected value (EV) threshold within this giant data set, et voilá, we had ourselves a sound, recommended starting hands, which was baed on real hard data, for each seat at a 9-handed table. We were then able to modify these charts for shorter-handed tables, like 6max and so on.

While I make no claim that these charts are perfect or will guarantee that you will win with them (there’s more to winning poker than just choosing the right starting hands, after all), I do believe the charts are pretty damn good. I used them myself for a couple months at stakes ranging from $5NL to $100NL as both a means to validate there effectiveness, as well as reinforce their habits into my own game. I also had a couple of my students use the charts in their own play during training sessions.

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The result is I now believe that these are solid, safe charts to use in your own game.

Your Homework Assignment

Knowing all this, your homework assignment is use a set of starting hand charts over the next 66 or more sessions you play in. I would recommend you use the ones I’m going to provide in upcoming posts, but that’s entirely up to you. Use a different set provided by someone else– but make sure it’s based on real data or results, and not just something that the author “knows” is correct.

Regardless of what charts you use, you actually need to use them. You need learn the habit of playing tighter up front, of folding trap hands in EP. You also need to learn the habit of loosening up in LP–but not too much. You need to learn the habit of discipline in your choice of starting hands. You need to literally use solid starting hand charts EVERY SINGLE TIME YOU PLAY for at least the next 66 sessions– until the habit of playing a correct foundational set of hands is hardwired into your brain and you play them on auto-pilot. Only then can you begin to open up and modify your game based on individual “it depends” situations.

It may be painful to use charts like this for this long, but I believe doing so will greatly improve your game. Religiously look at the charts before acting, each and every time you are dealt a new hand. Yes, you’ll memorize the charts quickly, but still look to be sure. Force yourself to follow the guidance of the charts. Don’t get tempted to deviate from them. Yes, there will be clear opportunities to deviate, and later when you’ve fully integrated these ABC hands into your play you can modify your play, but for now the goal is to build good foundational habits into your game.

Starting hand charts take one piece of the complexity pie away and replaces it with something safe and fundamental. They teach discipline. These kinds of charts force the player–you!–to employ position, whether the player–you!– understands its importance yet or not.

Said simply, starting hand charts are a good thing.

Summing Up

A starting hand chart isn’t the end-all, be-all of preflop hand selection, but it will get make the practice of playing tight up front a habit. If I had a nickel for every time I saw a player get stacked because they opened a shiny-bright hand like QJ suited or ATo under-the-gun, I’d be a rich man today. Quite literally as I was writing the first draft of this post, I received an email from a struggling player who complained of losing a deep stack in a cash game because they opened KJo in EP, were re-raised by someone in LP, called this raise, checked-called on a K-x-x flop, and then got married to their top pair right through an expensive river. This player check-called their entire stack away in a situation where they never should have seen a flop in the first place. If they’d made a habit of using a proper starting hand chart, they wouldn’t have been in that situation in the first place, and their stack would still be theirs, and sitting in front of the villain.

Beginners benefit the most from starting hand charts, but sometimes old hands need them too to fix their game. Sometimes you have to go back to the basics. I recommend that even if you’ve played poker for years that you take the time to review your starting hand selection. Use a chart and force yourself for some sessions to retool your game back to a basic, conservative starting point. Sometimes it’s harder to break bad habits than it is to learn new ones, so this may take a while, and it may be painful– but I still recommend it.

After you’ve made sound starting hand selection an auto-piloted habit in your game, and you begin progress in your skills and abilities, then you can begin to deviate from the charts. You can use the recommendations in the charts as a baseline starting point that you stray from as the circumstances call for. You can tighten or loosen up depending upon the table dynamics, players, reads, meta game, and so on…

…but until you have truly made it a habit to choose solid starting hands, you need to stick to the basics. At least for the next 66 sessions, that is.

~End~

*As you progress in your skills, you may occasionally make a different play with Aces in EP (like slow-playing or limp-reraising them), but those instances are very rare, and beginners should not even think about trying them until they master more basic skills and plays.

**Actually, 7-2 offsuit isn’t necessarily the “worst” starting hand in poker. In some situations, for example, 3-2 offsuit is actually worse. See, in poker “it always depends.”

Related Posts:

Learn. Master. Crush.

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In the poker game of Texas hold 'em, a starting hand consists of two hole cards, which belong solely to the player and remain hidden from the other players. Five community cards are also dealt into play. Betting begins before any of the community cards are exposed, and continues throughout the hand. The player's 'playing hand', which will be compared against that of each competing player, is the best 5-card poker hand available from his two hole cards and the five community cards. Unless otherwise specified, here the term hand applies to the player's two hole cards, or starting hand.

• 2Limit hand rankings

Essentials[edit]

There are 1326 distinct possible combinations of two hole cards from a standard 52-card deck in hold 'em, but since suits have no relative value in this poker variant, many of these hands are identical in value before the flop. For example, A♥J♥ and A♠J♠ are identical in value, because each is a hand consisting of an ace and a jack of the same suit.

Therefore, there are 169 non-equivalent starting hands in hold 'em, which is the sum total of : 13 pocket pairs, 13 × 12 / 2 = 78 suited hands and 78 unsuited hands (13 + 78 + 78 = 169).

These 169 hands are not equally likely. Hold 'em hands are sometimes classified as having one of three 'shapes':

• Pairs, (or 'pocket pairs'), which consist of two cards of the same rank (e.g. 9♠9♣). One hand in 17 will be a pair, each occurring with individual probability 1/221 (P(pair) = 3/51 = 1/17).

An alternative means of making this calculation

First Step As confirmed above.

There are 2652 possible combination of opening hand.

Second Step

There are 6 different combos of each pair. 9h9c, 9h9s, 9h9d, 9c9s, 9c9d, 9d9s

To calculate the odds of being dealt a pair

2652 (possible opening hands) divided by 12 (the number of any particular pair being dealt. As above)

2652/12 = 221

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Poker Hand Odds Chart

• Suited hands, which contain two cards of the same suit (e.g. A♣6♣). Four hands out of 17 will be suited, and each suited configuration occurs with probability 2/663 (P(suited) = 12/51 = 4/17).

• Offsuit hands, which contain two cards of a different suit and rank (e.g. K♠J♥). Twelve out of 17 hands will be nonpair, offsuit hands, each of which occurs with probability 2/221 (P(offsuit non-pair) = 3*(13-1)/51 = 12/17).

It is typical to abbreviate suited hands in hold 'em by affixing an 's' to the hand, as well as to abbreviate non-suited hands with an 'o' (for offsuit). That is,

QQ represents any pair of queens,

KQ represents any king and queen,

AKo represents any ace and king of different suits, and

JTs represents any jack and ten of the same suit.

There are 25 starting hands with a probability of winning at a 10-handed table of greater than 1/7.^[1]

Limit hand rankings[edit]

Some notable theorists and players have created systems to rank the value of starting hands in limit Texas hold'em. These rankings do not apply to no limit play.

Sklansky hand groups[edit]

David Sklansky and Mason Malmuth^[2] assigned in 1999 each hand to a group, and proposed all hands in the group could normally be played similarly. Stronger starting hands are identified by a lower number. Hands without a number are the weakest starting hands. As a general rule, books on Texas hold'em present hand strengths starting with the assumption of a nine or ten person table. The table below illustrates the concept:

Chen formula[edit]

The 'Chen Formula' is a way to compute the 'power ratings' of starting hands that was originally developed by Bill Chen.^[3]

Highest Card

Based on the highest card, assign points as follows:

Ace = 10 points, K = 8 points, Q = 7 points, J = 6 points.

10 through 2, half of face value (10 = 5 points, 9 = 4.5 points, etc.)

Pairs

For pairs, multiply the points by 2 (AA=20, KK=16, etc.), with a minimum of 5 points for any pair. 55 is given an extra point (i.e., 6).

Suited

Add 2 points for suited cards.

Closeness

Subtract 1 point for 1 gappers (AQ, J9)

2 points for 2 gappers (J8, AJ).

4 points for 3 gappers (J7, 73).

5 points for larger gappers, including A2 A3 A4

Add an extra point if connected or 1-gap and your highest card is lower than Q (since you then can make all higher straights)

Phil Hellmuth's: 'Play Poker Like the Pros'[edit]

Phil Hellmuth's 'Play Poker Like the Pros' book published in 2003.

Poker Hand Odds Calculator

Statistics based on real online play[edit]

Statistics based on real play with their associated actual value in real bets.^[4]

Nicknames for starting hands[edit]

In poker communities, it is common for hole cards to be given nicknames. While most combinations have a nickname, stronger handed nicknames are generally more recognized, the most notable probably being the 'Big Slick' - Ace and King of the same suit, although an Ace-King of any suit combination is less occasionally referred to as an Anna Kournikova, derived from the initials AK and because it 'looks really good but rarely wins.'^[5][6] Hands can be named according to their shapes (e.g., paired aces look like 'rockets', paired jacks look like 'fish hooks'); a historic event (e.g., A's and 8's - dead man's hand, representing the hand held by Wild Bill Hickok when he was fatally shot in the back by Jack McCall in 1876); many other reasons like animal names, alliteration and rhyming are also used in nicknames.

Notes[edit]

1. ^No-Limit Texas Hold'em by Angel Largay
2. ^David Sklansky and Mason Malmuth (1999). Hold 'em Poker for Advanced Players. Two Plus Two Publications. ISBN1-880685-22-1
3. ^Hold'em Excellence: From Beginner to Winner by Lou Krieger, Chapter 5, pages 39 - 43, Second Edition
4. ^http://www.pokerroom.com/poker/poker-school/ev-stats/total-stats-by-card/
5. ^Aspden, Peter (2007-05-19). 'FT Weekend Magazine - Non-fiction: Stakes and chips Las Vegas and the internet have helped poker become the biggest game in town'. Financial Times. Retrieved 2010-01-10.
6. ^Martain, Tim (2007-07-15). 'A little luck helps out'. Sunday Tasmanian. Retrieved 2010-01-10.