Starting Hands In Poker Chart
- Our poker starting hand charts will help you find your feet. We have itemised every poker hand, across each position and preflop situation allowing our users to get used to making solid preflop decisions that are profitable. On the right hand side you can see an example of a good way to use the poker starting hand chart.
- In poker you want to be wary about becoming too reliant on those pretty starting hand charts. They can be great for indicating which hands might be worth playing (and which should be thrown away.
Our poker starting hand charts will help you find your feet. We have itemised every poker hand, across each position and preflop situation allowing our users to get used to making solid preflop decisions that are profitable. On the right hand side you can see an example of a good way to use the poker starting hand chart.
Poker Tournament Starting Hands Guide From Harrington On Holdem
- Do These Starting Hands Work Online?
In ‘Harrington On Holdem Vol 1’ Dan Harrington outlined a tournament starting hands guide based on table position and your poker playing style. There are actually 3 styles covered: Conservative play, aggressive or LAG play and ‘super aggressive’ play. Since the latter style has no requirements this article will focus on the first 2.
The question this article will discuss is whether the starting hands mentioned are suitable for the lower level ($3 to $50) MTTs most commonly found online.
We will start by outlining Harrington’s Starting Hand Guide for poker tournaments and then look at the various stages of online poker tournament strategy to see how they fit.
Harrington's Tournament Starting Hands Guide – Conservative Approach
- Early Position (first 2 players to act): Pairs 10-10 to A-A , A-K off-suit and A-Q suited.
- Middle Position (places 3-6 to act): Pairs 8-8+, A-J off suit or better + K-Q
- Late Position (Button and Cut-Off): Pairs 7-7+, Any Ace + Suited Connectors J-10+
Dan Harrington’s suggestion for the conservative player is that these hands should be raised when no other player has already entered the pot. Where a player acting before you has already raised you need a hand from a higher group, compared to your position, in order to call. For example, if you are in middle position and someone has raised ahead of you then you need an ‘early position’ hand to call this bet.
Mark's Tip: Simply playing a more disciplined starting hand selection than your opponents is enough to give you a long-term edge in the smaller buy-in games. Check out my list of the Best Beginners Poker Tournaments for some extremely profitable ideas!
Harrington's Tournament Starting Hands Guide – Aggressive Approach
Hand Requirements To Raise: Any Pair, Any Ace, Any 2 Face-Cards + Suited Connectors 4-5 and higher.
Notice that there are no specific requirements for position here. The idea being that an aggressive player will raise to open a pot with these hands from any position. If someone has already raised then the requirements must tighten up. Harrington deals with this situation via numerous hand examples – you’ll need to read the book!
Stages Of An Online Poker Tournament – Harrington’s Starting Hands Analyzed
Poker Guide Chart
Conservative Approach – Early Stages
The advantage to the conservative approach in the early stages is that it will keep players out of trouble at a time when there are many wild, loose and otherwise inexperienced opponents at the table. While the criteria mean you’ll be throwing away hands which may be favorite for a single raise – those times you do enter a pot you’ll generally be a solid favorite to win.
Conservative Approach – Mid to Late Stages
Once the blinds start to rise as a proportion of your stack the need to accumulate chips increases. At this point the conservative starting hands start to become too tight. Imagine you have a pair of 9’s in mid position and a wildly aggressive player makes a small raise ahead of you – or you have 6-6 and the table folds to you on the button with only the extra-tight blinds to act. There are so many factors involved, including stack sizes and tendencies of opponents, that strict guidelines here would reduce your flexibility too much.
Conservative Approach – Final Table
If the conservative approach is too tight for the mid stages, by the time you reach the final table these poker tournament starting hands would be a disaster. The stacks will be shallow by now, meaning that stealing and re-stealing become significant factors. These hands will most probably only result in you blinding your way out of the tournament.
Aggressive Approach – Early Stages
Opening a large number of pots in the early stages will require significant post-flop skills. The reason is that you will be called by a variety of players – each with a wide variety of holdings. This is great if you flop a monster hand. However the times that you miss – or partially hit the flop – will create many potentially dangerous situations.
Aggressive Approach – Middle Stages
As the stacks become shallower compared to the blinds, the merits of the aggressive approach to tournament starting hand selection increase. You will be able to steal many pots – especially from late position. Caution when opponents have already raised ahead of you will make this approach even more effective.
Aggressive Approach – Final Table
At the final table an aggressive approach may well be your best chance of securing one of the (higher paying) top 3 places. Many opponents will have tightened up their own starting hand requirements here – looking to move up in the money. Selecting a wide variety of starting hands will allow you to win many pots without a fight. The stack sizes could also be factored into your hand selection here, raising ‘lighter’ when the blinds are not too big stacked or too short.
Dan Harrington’s Tournament Starting Hands Guide – Summary + Further Reading
The conservative approach to starting hand selection appears good for keeping out of trouble during the wild and loose early stages. However later in the tournament more aggression is required – both to stay ahead of the blinds and to win pots. If you have a skill edge over your opponents then it makes sense to choose a site where the blinds increase in smaller increments - giving you more time to exploit your opponent's mistakes before the game becomes a 'crap shoot'.
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To be fair Harrington covered this increase in aggression with his theory of inflection points and ‘M’ scores. The key with any starting hand guide is to allow your self the flexibility to step outside of this when the situation at the table warrants this. Finally, for a guide to the best online poker tournaments for beginners check out our detailed look at 10 of the best: Best Beginner Poker Tournaments – 10 of the best!
Related Articles
For a certain segment of new hold’em players, starting hand charts can be fascinating. Even those with many years of experience who have little need to consult such charts still find them interesting as debate-starters.
In hold’em there are 169 different combinations of hands you can be dealt. For those of us who enjoy working with numbers or creating lists with which to organize our lives, there’s something appealing about the idea of ranking all of those hands from 1 to 169, even if we know such a list probably might have only limited value when it comes to actual game play.
In truth, there are actually a lot more possible combinations of hole cards in hold’em — 1,326 of them, in fact. But that total also considers suits as distinct, when in fact before the community cards come the suits are all essentially of equal value.
That is to say, is of the same value as when playing preflop, while and are also of equivalent value. So, too, are the different combinations producing the same pocket pairs all equal before the flop in terms of their relative worth. While there are six different ways to get pocket aces — , , , , , — you're equally happy no matter what suits the cards are.
So we get rid of all of those redundant hands and say that in Texas hold'em there are 169 “non-equivalent” starting hands, breaking them down as follows:
- 13 pocket pairs
- 78 non-paired suited hands (e.g., with two cards of the same suit like or )
- 78 non-paired unsuited hands (e.g., with two cards of different suits like or )
Notice now the non-paired combinations of hole cards neatly divide into equal groups, both of which are six times as large (78) as the smaller group of pocket pairs (13). The total of 169 combinations represents a square, too — 13 x 13 — another curious symmetry when it comes to hold'em hands.
Still, that’s a lot of starting hand combinations — too many for most of us humans to keep in our heads — which is one reason hand ranking charts are appealing and even can be useful, since they help players think about certain two-card combos as “strong” or “average” or “weak” as possible starters.
Setting aside the idea of actually ranking the 169 hands from best to worst, we might think for a moment about other ways of categorizing starting hands in hold’em, using that initial breakdown of hands into pocket pairs, non-paired suited hands, and non-paired unsuited hand as a first step toward coming up with further, smaller groups that are easier to remember.
The 13 pocket pairs we might group as big or “premium” (, , and ), medium ( through ), and small ( through ).
Meanwhile, we might divide each of the other groups into “connectors,” “one-gappers,” and “two-gappers” (and so on), further thinking of them also as “big,” “medium,” and “small” while also keeping separate suited and non-suited combinations.
These categories of non-paired hands are created by thinking about straight-making possibilities (affected by connectedness) and flush-making possibilties (affected by suitedness). There are more ways to make straights with “connectors” — that is, two cards of consecutive rank like — than with two-gappers, three-gappers, and so on. So, too, do you have a better chance of making a flush with suited hole cards than with non-suited hole cards.
Another possible group to create would include “ace hands” — i.e., non-paired hands containing one ace — that can be thought of as “big aces” (e.g., , ), “medium aces” ( down to ), and “small aces” ( to ). Or “king hands,” too. We like keeping these groups in mind, as hands with big cards like an ace or king can connect with flops to make big pairs.
In any case, you can see how these criteria for making categories can help when it comes to building those starting hand charts. And in fact most of those charts feature a similar ordering of hands, with...
Poker Range Chart
- the premium pocket pairs and the big aces (suited and non-suited) up at the top;
- medium and small pocket pairs and big-to-medium suited connectors and one-gappers in the middle;
- and non-paired hands with less potential to make big pairs, straights, or flushes toward the bottom.
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Play NowHowever, there are problems with relying so heavily on starting hand charts that you don’t take into account factors that can make a given hand gain or lose value. Such as the flop. Or the turn. Or the river. Or other factors — including how your opponents are playing their hands — that can quickly affect the value of your starting hands.
After all, as anyone who’s played even a few hands of hold’em well knows, even if is the highest-ranking starting hand and a non-suited ranks as 169th, a couple of deuces among the community cards is all it takes to make the best hand worst and the worst hand best.
Learning the relative value of starting hands is definitely an important first step when it comes to getting started in hold’em. Other aspects of game play such as the importance of position, knowing when and how much to bet or raise, and thinking about opponents’ holdings and playing styles as hands proceed are good to learn, too, and help show how a great starting hand might not be so great five community cards later.
Poker is not blackjack, a game in which similar hand-ranking guides are sometimes used to inform players’ decisions about how to play. In poker you want to be wary about becoming too reliant on those pretty starting hand charts. They can be great for indicating which hands might be worth playing (and which should be thrown away), but troublesome if allowed to outweigh all of the other important factors that arise as a hand plays out.
That said, starting hand charts can be useful, especially for those new to hold’em. They also can be a big help when picking up other games, too, like pot-limit Omaha or the various stud games, if only to get an early idea what hands tend to play better than others.
But for many such charts ultimately are only themselves a way to get started, before the experience of playing helps players more instinctively recognize both hand groupings and how hands tend to compare in terms of profitability.
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Printable Poker Hands Chart
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