Winning Poker Hands

Winning Poker Hands - that's a big subject, and if it was easy to sort out then everybody would win at poker and that wouldn't be much fun. As you are here, we can probably assume that you are familiar with the poker hand rankings, but we will quickly recap them here -

Royal Flush
Straight Flush
Four of a kind
Full House
Flush
Straight
Three of a kind
Two Pair
Pair
High Card

If you want to see the order of Winning Poker Hands with a full description of each see our
Poker Hands Page.

If you need any help with Poker Terms you find here, check out our Poker Terms Page.

Finally, if you just want to check Poker Hand Odds for a particular poker hand then try our Poker Odds Calculator.

Right. So you know what beats what in poker. Now, how do you get from the two cards in your hand to a winning poker hand?

Well, that's where your Poker Starting Hands selection comes in. Before we continue, let's make no mistake about this, an awful lot has been written about poker and an awful lot more will be written in the future. What we provide here is a basic outline of Poker Starting Hands selection.

Poker Starting Hands

David Sklansky was the first poker author to have both ranked all of the starting 2-card hands, and then grouped them with recommendations about how to play each group. David "Einstein" Sklansky (a nickname attributed to him in Doyle Brunson's book, Super/System) has been a professional poker player and poker theoretician for decades, and his advice is widely respected.

Further sources for poker starting hands requirements are poker hand statistics that are available from some online poker rooms; one of the most extensive is from PokerRoom.com.

The value of your starting hand will vary according to such factors as your position at the table, and the number of players in the hand. For instance, a pair of aces (AA) will win about 80% of the time against one other player; but against nine other players it will win about 30% of the time. Of course, it will win more when it does win, but that's a different article.

So, the top poker starting hands are;

AA KK QQ JJ AKs AQs TT AK AJs KQs 99 ATs AQ KJs 88 QJs
These top sixteen poker starting hands are very strong and can be played from any position. All of these poker starting hands have a positive expectation; that is, you can expect to profit from playing these hand over the long term. Unfortunately, you will only get these poker starting hands about 10% of the time. Not only boring, but you will pay as much in blinds as you can expect to win with these starting hands, so ultimately pointless.

If you include the next sixteen poker starting hands that have a positive expectation -

KTs A9s AJ QTs KQ 77 JTs A8s K9s AT A5s A7s KJ 66 T9s A4s

but avoid playing them in early position, and mainly call rather than raise, then you can double your poker starting hand requirements. Even so, that is a fairly limited poker game, and you will soon be recognized as an ultra tight player. Adding the next thirty nine hands down to a pair of twos gives you a fairly large amount of poker starting hands.

Q9s J9s QJ A6s 55 A3s K8s KT 98s T8s K7s A2s 87s QT Q8s 44 A9 J8s 76s JT
97s K6s K5s K4s T7s Q7s K9 65s T9 86s A8 J7s 33 54s Q6s K3s Q9 75s 22 J9

This last group of poker starting hands should only be played in late position, and should be folded against any raise. Basically, trying to see the flop for as little cost as possible and then folding if you haven't hit.

So there you have a brief guide to poker starting hand selection. Turning your poker starting hands into winning poker hands is the next step.

Winning Poker Hands

Again we want to stress that you can never read enough about poker starting hand selection, poker table position and strategy, and anything else poker related thatt you can get your hands on.

The key to winning at poker is ... folding. Folding losing hands before they cost you money is as important as playing winning hands properly.

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