Texas Holdem Poker Hand Rankings
- Texas Hold Em Cheat Sheet
- Poker Hand Rankings Texas Holdem Starting Hands Chart
- How To Play Texas Holdem For Beginners
- Poker Hand Ranking Printable
Texas Hold Em Cheat Sheet
In the section titled Hand Rankings in Part One of their book Hold Em Poker For Advanced Players, David Sklansky and Mason Malmuth present a set of groups for the starting hands, i.e. the hole or pocket cards dealt the player by the dealer. To quote:
The reason for this is that most of the hands in each grouping can be played roughly the same before the flop in many, but not all, situations.
Furthermore:
These rankings reflect not only which group each starting hand belongs to, but its approximate order in that group as well. In reality, it’s usually only necessary to know in which group a starting hand belongs.
And, finally:
Poker Hand Rankings Texas Holdem Starting Hands Chart
Official poker rankings: ties and kickers. Poker is all about making the best five-card poker hand from the seven cards available (five community cards plus your own two hole cards). That means in the event of a tie with four of a kind, three of a kind, two pair, one pair, or high card, a side card, or 'kicker', comes into play to decide who wins the pot.
If you are new to hold ’em we feel it is very important to memorize these groupings. There is no way around this, and the tables make the task much easier. Once the tables are memorized, this system will facilitate applying many of the concepts that follow.
As it turns out, I memorized the grouping lists and not the tables that follow them, and the reason why I delayed starting this blog was that it took me from mid-January till last Friday 10th April to complete the task of memorization. If I am entirely honest, I did not have confidence that I would be up to the task, and I wanted to take it step by step, and ensure I had committed each group to memory before moving on to the next group.
Official Poker Hand Rankings. Official poker hands ranking overview with an explanation of which hand wins in Texas Hold’em. Including PDF overview for printing. Official Poker Hand Rankings Know your poker hand order. A poker hand consists of five cards, which fall into several categories. Below is the complete list of poker hands, from highest to lowest. Please note that hand rankings for Short Deck are slightly different. Find out more about the short deck poker hand rankings on the dedicated page. Poker Hand Combinations Explained. Poker hands fall into one of ten categories. The highest is a royal flush, followed by a straight flush, then four of a kind, a full house, a flush, a straight.
To further quote them:
The rankings are as follows, with an “s” indicating suited and an “x” indicating a small card. Note that a 10 is represented as “T.” Also, if no “s” appears, then the hand is not suited. (These notations will be used throughout this book.)
I replicate the groups and ranks here, as I have committed them to memory. Believe it or not!
How did I memorize this list? I did this through rote memorization, before I discovered the memory palace, but with the added twist of using the Phonetic Alphabet to help commit the groups to memory. So, for example, I memorized Group 1, by reciting the hands as follow:
Group 1: Alfa-Alfa, Kilo-Kilo, Quebec-Quebec, Juliett-Juliett, Alfa-Kilo-Sierra
and finally, as another example, I memorized Group 4, by reciting the hands as follows:
Group 4: Tango-Nine-Sierra, Kilo-Quebec, Eight-Eight, Quebec-Tango-Sierra, Nine-Eight-Sierra, Juliett-Nine-Sierra, Alfa-Juliett, Kilo-Tango-Sierra.
How To Play Texas Holdem For Beginners
So, if you memorize the phonetic alphabet, it becomes easier to memorize the lists as they appear in the text.
Poker Hand Ranking Printable
Observe that you are memorizing 5+5+6+8+11+10+12+15=72 useful hands, grouped by ranking. Now, there are 13×13=169 card combinations, and 1,326 combinations if you consider all suits as separately counted.