Texas Hold Up Hands
When playing Texas Holdem poker offline in private or social settings the role of the dealer is taken by one of the players and moves round the players after each hand in a clockwise direction. Texas Hold 'Em (or Texas Holdem) is the primary version of Poker played in many casinos, and it's the version seen on television shows like the Travel Channel's World Poker Tour and ESPN's World Series.
This section contains strategy articles for playing specific hands and certain types of hands in no limit Texas Hold'em.
Remember that these are simply rough guidelines for playing different starting hands in Texas Hold'em. There are an almost endless variety of situations that you can find yourself in with each of these hands, so they are far from being an all-round 'ultimate guide'.
Texas Hold'em hand strategy articles.
| Title | Level | Category | Utility |
|---|---|---|---|
| Playing Pocket Aces | Beginner | Hands | 5/10 |
| Playing Pocket Kings | Beginner | Hands | 5/10 |
| Small Pocket Pairs | Intermediate | Hands | 7/10 |
| Playing Ace King | Intermediate | Hands | 6/10 |
| Playing Pocket Queens | Intermediate | Hands | 5/10 |
| Rag Aces | Intermediate | Hands | 5/10 |
| Drawing Hands | Advanced | Hands | 7/10 |
| Drawing Hands w/ Aggression | Advanced | Hands | 6/10 |
If you're looking for a guide on how to play a hand of Texas Hold'em from start to finish, try the hand guide.
Hand strategy section highlights.
Important hand strategy articles.
None of the strategy guides for the specific hands above are going to prove to be essential to improving your game (hence the lower than average utility ratings), as playing solid Texas Hold'em is all about evaluating the situation and using your own logic to make the most profitable decision possible.
Texas Holdem Hands Ranking
Playing good Texas Hold'em is not about waiting for certain hands and then playing according to a set of rules. A monkey can do that, and I'm fairly sure that I could beat a monkey at Poker.
But still, that's not to say that these hand guides can't be a little useful. The article on how to play small pocket pairs is one of the most informative articles in the section as it touches upon additional mathematical concepts such as pot odds and implied odds.
Other useful Hold'em hand strategy articles.
I like the drawing hands and playing drawing hands with aggression articles for the same reason why I like the small pocket pairs article - it teaches other important concepts about Texas Holdem that will be more valuable to you than rules and guidelines for specific hands.
Anyway, that's enough of me lecturing you on why playing according to specific rules is filthy and horrible. Just enjoy these articles and try to avoid thinking about decisions from inside a box.
Go back to the awesome Texas Hold'em Strategy.
Comments
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:
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.
Texas Holdem Hands To Fold
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:
Texas Holdem Hands Odds
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.