How many holdem starting hands are there

Or other factors — including how your opponents are playing their hands — that can quickly affect the value of your starting hands. 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. 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.

Get all the latest PokerNews updates on your social media outlets. Live Events 1 World Series of Poker. Active 1 year, 10 months ago. Viewed 20k times. The following is a passage from Wikipedia on starting hands probability: The 1, starting hands can be reduced for purposes of determining the probability of starting hands for Hold 'em—since suits have no relative value in poker, many of these hands are identical in value before the flop.

Improve this question. Theo Theo 3 3 gold badges 10 10 silver badges 20 20 bronze badges. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Improve this answer. Just to add additional info, as you mention, "Combinations" DON'T consider the relative order of items, whereas "Permutations" DO consider the relative order of items. TobyBooth - With combinations, order doesn't matter, with permutations, order does matter.

But surely you know this. Are you using the word "consider" in a way I don't understand? TTT Oops, Typo. Just mixed them up ; Thanks for catching that! Fixing now. Community Bot 1.

Hands like A2o and A3o are at the very bottom of this range and should only sometimes be played from late position. Connectors — These hands include any two cards that are connected and of the same suit. AKs is a premium hand and should always be played from any position. KQs is also a very good hand, while QJs, JTs and T9s are hands that play very well from most positions and have the potential to draw to flushes and straights and win big pots.

The lower suited connectors , like 76s and 54s, are playable as a raise first in from the late positions, but should be folded from early position. Gappers — Suited one-gappers are hands like KJs, T8s, 75s, etc. The bigger the gap, the more selective you should be with these hands.

The top gapper hands like KJs play well as raises from the middle to late positions. The most important thing to keep in mind with hands such as K-Q or A-J is you almost never want to call a raise with these hands.

These hands are the most commonly dominated hands when faced with a raise, and as such will lose you significant money if you get into the habit of calling raises with them. If your opponent is a very tight player there is little chance he will be putting in large bets against you if he can't beat top pair.

Suited connectors can be some of the most valuable hands in No Limit Hold 'em cash games. That being said, they aren't sure things and will miss everything far more often than they will hit it big. You want to fold small suited connectors if not all suited connectors from early position. In middle to late position you want to play these hands with due diligence. You don't want to be calling large raises to play these hands heads up.

Your goal with these hands is to play the largest pots possible for the least amount of investment possible. You need great odds to make money on these. Without the odds, they should be folded from any position.

Similar to suited connectors, these hands are played only to take down very large pots for a very small investment. You are not playing these hands to hit an ace and get into a betting war.

As explained in this article, you don't want to play against an ace, even if you have a small ace yourself. If you don't hit a draw on the flop or better yet the nuts , you should be done with these hands. It's almost never profitable to be paying for backdoor draws. Simply put, every other hand you can be dealt is going to lose you money. As a beginner or even intermediate player, hands that may look great - such as an off-suit Q-J or J - are simply going to lose you money in the long run.

The worse the hands you play, the harder the decisions you're going to have to make post-flop. The goal as a beginner poker player is to make as few mistakes as possible. And the best way to limit the number of mistakes you make is to reduce the number of difficult decisions you have to make.

Stick to only playing the hands in this list. Throw away the weaker of these hands when out of position, and only play against a raise if you have a very strong hand or the odds with a strong drawing hand.

Follow those guidelines, and you'll be on a fast track to making profit. This Cheat Sheet covers every kind of starting hand and gives you easy-to-follow instructions on how to play them before and after the flop.

The infographic also includes helpful stats about how likely it is for someone else to have a bigger pocket pair than you before the flop. And how likely it is for you to see an overcard on the board when you hold different pocket pairs.

Click the image below for a larger version. Play strong hands that lose less. Use the odds in your favor and ignore could have been.