Hold Em Starting Hands Chart
Based on the tabulated data and chart generated, there are a few interesting observations to be made. The are listed below:
This is compared to only 169 starting hands in Texas Hold'em, or 2,652 if we include the suits. Omaha has 100x more starting hand combinations than Texas Hold'em, and, therefore, starting hand charts like the top 30 below can't be used as a strict guide. It is here merely to illustrate the principles of good hand selection in Omaha. Texas Holdem Heads-Up Preflop Odds. This table was created by enumerating through every possible board and opponent hole card combination for each of the 169 texas holdem preflop starting hands. The numbers are exact to the rounding I used, which was. Poker Odds Charts. Poker odds charts come in useful when you want to quickly work out the odds of winning a hand in Texas Hold'em. The most commonly used odds charts are the 'standard poker odds charts' below, which give both the percentage and ratio odds of completing your draw depending on the number of outs you have (see pot odds and drawing hands for more information).
1. Pair A is best hand
There should be no surprise that Pair A is the best hand. Having a pair A, helps you to easily get the best possible double pair combo or three-of-kind combo. While it might be harder to strike straight or flush with it, those scenarios are typically less likely to happen. Thus, making pair A better in general.
2. Offsuit 72 is the worst hand
This might be less known to people and it could be counter intuitive. Some might have thought that perhaps Offsuit J2 would be worse than Offsuit 72. But, that is not the case.
Starting Poker Hand Odds
To understand why this is the case, we can start thinking about what are combinations that are most likely to lead to a winning combo assuming no one folds. Given any hands, we are more likely to win with double pair, followed by 3-of-a-kind, straight flush and so forth.
With offsuit 72, we are more likely to win double pair of pair 7 and pair 2, followed by three-of-a-kind and so on. However, it is also worthwhile to note that it is highly like other players has a better double pair or three-of-a-kind. This bring us to the next important lesson to learn.
3. Having a suited, closely connected hand with A, K or Q is better than having pairs that is less than 9
If you were to investigate the table or chart, the hand ranked 5th is Suited AK. What is even more interesting is pairs hand only took 6 spots from rank 1 to rank 20. Most of the remaining spots were taken up by suited, closely connected hands with a high card like A, K or Q.
The reason for this is similar to previous point that we made. It is more frequent that players will win using double pairs or 3-of-a-kind. Therefore, having a higher card helps to push you to a better standing to win.
One final note on this topic - Pair 9 is the last pair hand ranked in the top 20 hands. Playing any other pairs hand may not be as good as conventional wisdom might suggest.
4. Winning chance drops fast within the top 7 ranked hands
This is the lesson that really took us by surprised. While developing our poker odds calculator, we did had a sense that odds of winning was somewhat asymmetric. But, the chart above really solidify how much the asymmetry was.
Within the top 7 ranked hands, the probability of winning drops really fast from paired A to paired K and so forth. If you get the top 7 hands, you really should work hard to get through the preflop.
Texas Holdem Starting Hands Chart
5. You are more likely to win a 6 players match than a 9 players one
A player with hands that are in the top 7 ranks in a 6 players game have a much better chance of winning in a 9 players game. For example, Paired A has roughly 49.5% preflop winning probability in a 6-player game compared to only 35% in a 9-players game. While 14.5% difference is not as big as it sounds, it has a significant impact on the pot odds that you will need to make a value play. In short, it might be easier to make money off a 6 players game rather than a 9 players game.
6. In a no-folding six players match, your hand range to play is very large
This point is not as crucial as other points we have made. But, we find this observation quite interesting although it is unlikely to happen in real life.
Suppose that we are in a no-folding 6 players Texas Hold'Em match. During every betting session, our pot odds is 5-to-1. This means that for every $1 we bet, we stand to win $5.
Based on this pot odds, our break-even pot equity or winning odds is around 16.67%. Using the chart above, we can see that we can play any hands better than rank 106. This means that players can play 105 types of hands out of 169 types (59.2% of all types) and still perform better than break even! Basically, you have a very large hand range to play in this type of situation.
Nonetheless, this is a just-for-fun analysis, which does not happen that often in real life. Based on some of our experience playing, it could happen sometimes during preflop though.
7. Our hand rankings are similar to Sklansky hand groups
Sklansky hand groups was formulated by David Sklansky and Mason Malmuth. Both of these old school poker players understand the math very well. It is no surprise that our hand rankings aligns very well with their proposed hand groups.
Limit Hold'em Starting Hands Chart
Sklansky hand group proposes that Tier 1 group consists of pair A, pair K, pair Q, pair J and suited AK. These cards are essentially ranked 1 to 5 via our Monte Carlo simulation. The same observation can be made for Sklansky Tier 2 and Tier 3 hand group.