Starting Hands

Starting Hand Rankings

The starting hand is your pre-flop hand made up of your two pocket cards. There are 1326 possible starting hands in Texas Hold'em when considering all the possible ranks and suits of the pocket cards.

The best starting hands have high ranking cards and relatively good odds to form trips or higher while the worst starting hands have low ranking cards and relatively bad odds to form anything higher than pair. The top five hands are known as premium hands and when you get one of them you will in most cases win the showdown.

The take home message is that you can never have over 94% pot equity with any starting hand. You can realistically expect around 85% against a SINGLE opponent on the rare occasions when you hold the overall strongest starting hand AA. It is also important to note that it does not make much of a difference to your pot equity if your opponent holds a high or low pair as long as your pair is higher. Another important relationship is that the weaker your starting hand and the more starting hands you are up against, the worse your pot equity. When holding AA and facing many and relatively strong starting hands such as KK, QQ and JJ you could be looking at a pot equity near the 50% mark which is a generous portion by any measure but still a lot less than 85%. A starting hand is profitable to play in the long run as long as its pot equity is bigger than the portion of the pot made up by your bets. Unfortunately you can't see the specific pocket cards held by your opponents and as a consequence you can never know your exact pot equity. Pot equity is on top of that extremely complicated to calculate on the fly and fact of the matter is that not even the professional players do that. The key to success is to memorize the most important data and the starting hand rankings are a good place to start.

High, Medium, Low, Rag & Kicker

Hold’em is a game of high cards or more specifically; a game of high pocket cards. This is because the majority of cards that form your hand are shared by all players and that makes your pocket cards decisive. They set you apart from the other players and will ultimately decide winner, loser and ties.  

The thirteen card rankings are loosely divided into three groups as follows:  

Pocket Pairs

Two pocket cards of the same rank are known as a pocket pair. They are the only made hands among the starting hands. Pocket pairs are generally very good starting hands, some are in fact the best, but their rank must always be considered. A pocket pair is not necessarily better than other combinations of pocket cards.  

Suited & Connected Starting Hands

Suited and connected cards play a central role in Hold’em because flushes and straights do happen quite frequently and a lower ranking starting hand has slightly better odds against a higher ranking starting hand by not sharing suits or straights. By sharing suits or straights a lower ranking hand will lose even if it improves to a straight or flush. By not sharing suits or straights it has a better chance of winning.

Pocket cards other than pocket pairs are overall better suited than off suit seeing as they have better odds of forming a flush with the community cards to come. The same goes for connectors which are are generally better starting hands than gap connectors and the bigger the gap, the worse the odds of forming a straight with the community cards to come.

Starting Hands Bottom Line

As you may have noticed the rank of the pocket cards holds the key to the rank of the starting hand and there is a clear break point between good and bad odds around card rank 8. This allows us a very simple yet complete view of the starting hand landscape and makes it possible to establish the general starting hand theorem of Hold’em:

This means that 85% of your starting hands are going to be trash which you can’t expect to win showdowns with under normal circumstances. This is why some call it Texas Fold’em.