Texas Holdem Poker Hands Best To Worst

Texas Holdem Poker Hands Best To Worst Average ratng: 6,4/10 648 votes

My thoughts exactly. The worst hand you could have is the worst hand you ALWAYS play, no matter what. For instance, a pair of 7s, let’s say. Most of the people tend to fold pockets 2s, 3s, 4s, 5s, even 6s, especially when you play a bigger table. But 7s you tend to play it and will probably lose. Below you will find a list of poker hands in order from highest to lowest to help you get started, as well as the top starting hands for Texas Hold'em. Click the button on the right to get a cheat sheet that displays the traditional poker hand rankings, which are used in the most popular variants of poker (such as Texas Hold‘em).

  • Poker starting hands: The 6 Best Hands You Must Know About Poker Hand Rankings - Highest to Lowest (Great for Beginners) Poker Hands – Best Texas Hold'em Poker Hands – The Top Hands.
  • Print out this free poker hand rankings chart – and always know the best winning poker hands. Poker hands are ranked in order from best to worst. Royal Flush An ace high straight flush. Straight Flush Five consecutive cards in the same suit. Four of a Kind Four cards of the same rank.
  • 2-7 (offsuit) A 2-7 offsuit hand is the worst hand to start with in Texas Hold 'Em poker because there are so few good options available to you: you have no straight draw, no flush draw, and even if you wind up with a pair of 7s or a pair of 2s, you're unlikely to have the best hand. Of course, you'll see some crazy flops every now and then, but just because you see a rare 7-7-2 flop once in a.

These days, even the most casual of poker fans who might happen upon a WSOP broadcast during the summer knows that the best Texas Hold’em starting hand is pocket aces. With an additional 1,300+ potential starting hand combinations, however, the overwhelming majority of the hands you’ll be dealt will consist of inferior holdings. As such, it is best to know how to deal with other card combinations that might come your way.

Texas Holdem Poker Hands Best To Worst

Sometimes the cards you’re dealt will look appealing and you’ll want to play them. Think a couple face cards, perhaps. Maybe you’ve gotten a couple of connected cards or maybe they’re suited (BUT THEY WERE SUITED!). In most situations, you’ll find that pairs are at least somewhat playable but for all those other hole card combos you’ll get, just like Kenny Rogers’ famous song “The Gambler” advises, “you’ve got to know when to hold’em, and know when to fold ’em.”

The more easily you’re able to identify weak starting hand combos, the quicker you’ll be able to make the right decisions at the table. When to bet, raise, call… or throw your hand away. The easiest decision you’ll usually have is throwing away your hand when it’s quite literally one of the worst combinations possible.

Best Hands For Texas Holdem

So, without further ado, we present to you the worst Texas Hold’em starting hands.

Deuce-Seven

Holding a 2 and a 7 (off suit) as your starting hand is without a doubt the worst hand you can get dealt. At best, you’d realistically be hoping to catch a 2 or 7 among the community cards on the flop for a low pair, which still makes for a relatively weak hand to carry on with. In pretty much every scenario then, whether you’ve found yourself a seat at the live casino card games or at your friend’s Friday home poker table, folding is the way to go when dealt the dreaded Deuce-Seven.

Deuce-Eight

The same issues that arise with the previous card combination are present at this one. In fact, it’s only marginally better. Should you decide to go against conventional wisdom and choose to proceed with such holdings, even if you improve to a pair on the flop, you’ll almost always find yourself behind and needing additional help to improve versus your opponents. Save yourself the hassle – and the money! – and get rid of the Deuce-Eight as quickly as you can… yes, even if they’re suited.

Three-Seven and Three-Eight

At this point, you probably know the drill. Starting hand combinations of 3-7 and 3-8 are, indeed, better than the aforementioned couple of combinations. The only advantage these combinations have over the ones we’ve listed already is that there’s an outside chance you might hit an inside straight with precisely the right flop. That, however, is most certainly NOT a reason to hold on to these starting hands. If you’ve got any interest in protecting your poker bankroll, toss the cards into the muck.

Deuce, Three, or Four and a Nine

You pick up your hole cards and start to peel… the first card you see is a 9. Not great, but not horrible either. Then you lift up the second card ever so slightly to reveal… a 2, or a 3, or a 4. The disappointment you feel should be palpable. Even if you’re no math expert and don’t realize that the chances of you winning with a starting hand of that nature are very slim, that sinking feeling you got when discovering that second card ought to lead you to do the right thing, namely chuck the hand.

Conclusion

We’re pretty sure you’ve gotten the picture by now. It doesn’t take a card sharp to realize that while many of the hands you’ll be dealt aren’t too great to start out with, some of them are just pure rubbish and out to be discarded.

So there you have it, a rundown of some of the worst possible starting hand combinations you can possibly be dealt in Texas Hold’em. Hopefully, this is the only place you’ll ever have to see such trashy cards, and the dealers will always send premium hands your way.

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Martin Harris

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...

  • 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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Poker Hands Texas Holdem Rules

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However, 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.

Texas Holdem Hands Best To Worst

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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