Poker Starting Hands Ranking
Based on the tabulated data and chart generated, there are a few interesting observations to be made. The are listed below:
Poker Hand Notation. Let’s first become familiar with the common poker starting hand notations you’ll often see in articles from the Upswing Poker Strategy section and elsewhere. All Texas Hold’em starting hands can be separated into two categories: “suited” and “offsuit”. Tune up your game with statistical hand rankings that show you exactly which hands fare best long-term against multiple opponents. Of course, the fundamentals of poker are based on proper starting hand selection so take a look at the above charts and see how the cards you play rank. How many Poker Hands are there? There are only 10 distinct poker hand ranks, but if you randomly deal 5 cards from a deck of 52 cards there are exactly 2,598,960 possible card combinations. Poker Hand Odds for 5-Card-Poker. The poker hand ranking charts are based on the probability for each distinct hand rank.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In the first part of the article we looked at Six plus Hand Rankings, where it became clear that the 16 cards missing from the deck in this variant leads to a slight, but important, changes in how strong the starting hands are which we will receive.
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Pocket Aces
If we look at traditional Texas Hold’em starting hands, we would expect to get our beloved AA about once every 221 hands, so what about in our new version of the game?
Well, without troubling you with the maths (I CAN do it, honestly!) the answer is you’ll get your pocket rockets once every 105 hands, which is more than twice as often as in Texas Hold’em!
Naturally, what goes for aces also goes for the other pairs – you’ll have a pocket pair more than twice as regularly in Six plus Hold’em (as will your opponent! Don’t forget this important consideration).
Are there any other changes we need to know about regarding starting hands?
Let's Say We have JJ
A naturally tricky starting hand in Texas Hold’em, but one we would probably open-raise with pre-flop. How does it fare in Six Plus?
We need to realize that instead of beating nine other pairs pre-flop, now it is only a favorite against 5, and still a dog to QQ, KK and AA. So it is not as strong in this respect.
However, because 3 of a kind now beats a straight in Six Plus, flopping a set becomes very strong against many hands – flushesare harder to come by, as we saw previously, because there are only nine cards of any single suit available in the deck.
So, how often will our smaller pairs flop a set? In Texas Hold’em it’s about 11.8% or roughly one time in eight. In Six Plus, we will do the maths quickly (just to prove I can!)
There are 36 cards in the pack, we have – let’s say again – JJ in our hand. So there are two jacks left in the 34 remaining cards.
What About the Hated 72 Offsuit?
In traditional Texas Hold’em this is the worst starting hand, and almost completely unplayable. Well, as you can probably work out yourself quite easily, in Six Plus the equivalent hand is J 6 offsuit, which, let’s be honest, would rarely be played even in our normal game!
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Poker Starting Hands Ranked
Winning Poker Hands Printable Pdf
Playing AK Becomes an 'Interesting' Problem
Well, first off, we will be dealt AK about 2.5% of our hands – which is quite a lot of the time, maybe once every five or six rounds at a full ring table, so it’s important enough to learn its worth in Six Plus Hold’em.
If we accept that suited versions become a lot more valuable - flushes beat full houses in our new version - then it can also make sense to play AKs slower than usual. Mixing our game up with AKs hides our play better, while AKo is still a very strong hand which we can 3-bet and even consider stacking off with.
Small Pairs
Omaha Poker Starting Hand Rankings
Of course 66 now becomes the smallest pocket pair. In Texas Hold’em we could consider calling pre-flop raises with this hand if the price was right – flopping a set and cracking a higher pair is our main goal – but now we have to consider that we are essentially playing 22 in a game where set-over-set sees our 6’s screwed, although on the plus side they do now beat straights!
Relative Hand Values
Poker Starting Hands Rankings
We need to be aware that these change a fair bit from Texas Hold’em, since stronger hands in general are being played across the board. Top pair, top kicker is nowhere near as strong – in fact it is very unlikely to win on its own as a best hand at showdown in 6-max or full-ring when we play Six Plus Hold’em.
There is also the ‘alternative river version’ of the game to consider, when receiving an extra hole card means that hand strengths can become stronger still.
So, in general two pair would be a median winning hand at full-ring – a useful thing to know when planning your hand strategy!
We will look at the change in Pot Odds in part 3, but a casual glance at things like ‘drawing hands’ shows that we are more likely to his many of them, as we have fewer cards left containing the same number of outs. For example, a gutshot – where any of four cards hits for us – now gives us 4/31 chances to hit after the flop, as opposed to 4/47 in Texas Hold’em – a significant difference indeed!
Texas Holdem Starting Hand Ranking
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