There are three charts, UNRAISED, RAISED and BLINDS. These are our Action charts, and show us what action to take when we have a hand in one of the starting hand groups. Similarly when opponents have shown strength at the table by raising we will only play the better cards against them. When we are in position we will play a wider range of groups and out of position we will only play the stronger groups. Ok, so now we have our selection of 46 hands, and have split them into 8 groups based on strength, now what? Well we won’t just automatically play any of those 46 hands when they are dealt to us, we will make a decision based on the position we are in, and the situation we are faced with at the table. Take a minute just to browse the hands in each group, you don’t need to memorise these, as you can use the chart to refer to, and once you have used it for a while, you will start to remember which hands are in which groups.

The ‘s’ next to some of the hands stands for Suited, so two cards of the same suit. ‘AJs’ could stand for A J whereas ‘AJ’ could stand for A J Of course there are many more hand combinations weaker than the hands in Group H, but we are not interested in playing with these and they will be folded into the muck straight away. Group A are the strongest hands in poker based on the statistics and group H are the weakest hands that we are willing to play.

Those 46 hands have been separated into 8 groups named Group A to H. We have chosen 46 different hands that we will play depending on the position and situation we are in. The following section is a key part of your strategy and you should practise choosing the right action before the flop using the poker starting hands chart below. You could look at all the statistical information and studies, but we’ve taken all the work out of it for you. Therefore the benefit of playing in position makes up for the weaker starting hands we may play. So we combine the position concept with our starting hand concept, to allow us to only play a narrow starting hand selection when out of position and to play a wider range of starting hands when we are in position. Of course if we just waited for the two or three best poker starting hands then we wouldn’t actually play many hands as the probability of these cards being dealt is only once in a while.

Remember, when we play a hand, we want to play with the odds in our favour, and by selectively choosing which starting hands we play we can ensure this. Since we now know which are the best starting hands in poker then we can apply this knowledge to our strategy. By Starting Hand we mean the two hole cards which are dealt to you at the start of each hand.

Texas holdem best hands pre flop