• Texas Holdem Poker Hands Chart
• Texas Holdem Poker Hands Ranked Poker
• Texas Holdem Poker Hands Ranked Against

Texas Hold’em hand rankings The rank of hands remains the same no matter which type of poker game you play. In a nutshell, a poker hand consists of five cards. Poker hands fall into one of several categories, such as flush, straight, or two pair.

Every beginning player, therefore, needs to understand the poker hand rankings to determine the strength of each player’s hand and, subsequently, the winner. In this guide, we present the Texas Hold’em hands order of value, from bottom to the highest hand in poker (the rankings apply to Omaha too). Best Texas Hold ‘Em Starting Hands Each hand in Texas Hold’em begins with all players receiving two face-down cards. These cards, known as hole cards, are only visible to the player they’re dealt. Some of the best holdings on the starting hands chart include the following two-card hands: Pocket Aces.

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.

Texas Holdem Poker Hands Chart

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:

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.

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.

So, if you memorize the phonetic alphabet, it becomes easier to memorize the lists as they appear in the text.

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.

Rank of Hands

In Texas Hold'em poker, players compare five card hands against each other to determine who wins. A player with a Royal Flush has a better hand than a player with a Full House, for example. Below is a list of standard combinations ranked from best to worst.

Texas Holdem Poker Hands Ranked Poker

Texas Holdem Poker Hands Ranked Against