Starting Hand Selection:Chen Formula : Sklansky Starting Hand Groups

The Sklansky & Malmuth starting hands table.

1. There are many poker variations besides n/l (no limit holdem) but all the hand rankings remain the same for the most part so learning your hand rankings is key to learning to play poker online and offline, our poker hand trainer will test how much you have learned from the hand rankings chart or even help you learn the poker hand order without.
2. 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.
3. No Limit Texas Hold’em Hand Rankings The following is the ranking of general poker hands from highest to lowest. The higher the ranking the harder the hand is to get, and thus it beats hands lower in the rank.

Now, let's talk about starting hands in Texas Hold'em. Ranking The Top 20 No Limit Texas Hold’em Starting Hands. I wanted to include something a bit more exciting in this article, so here's the top 20 No Limit Hold'em starting hands in terms of raw all-in equity (or percentages). Texas Holdem Rankings for All 169 Starting Hands. Ever since the early days of Texas holdem poker, players have attempted to analyze and organize the 169 possible two card starting hands found in the game.

This table comes from the book Hold 'em Poker for Advanced Players by David Sklansky and Mason Malmuth.

This is a strategy book for limit Hold'em, but the starting hand groups do have some practical use in no limit Hold'em.

What is the Sklansky and Malmuth starting hands table?

The table is a general ranking of hands in Texas Hold'em.

The Sklansky and Malmuth starting hands table groups together certain hands in Texas Hold'em based on their strength. Starting with the strongest set of hands that you can be dealt in group 1, the hands get progressively weaker working down the table until the virtually unplayable hands in group 9.

The rough idea is that a hand in one group has roughly the same value and can be played the same way preflop as any other hand in that group.

How to use the starting hands table.

In their book, Sklansky and Malmuth provide some in-depth guidelines for starting hand strategy in limit Texas Hold'em using this table. Unfortunately, I'm not going to work out any guidelines for you for the NL Hold'em game using this table because:

No Limit Hold'em Hand Rankings

1. It would be quite a tricky job.
2. It would be difficult to remember and implement.
3. Like any starting hand strategy, it would have its flaws.
4. You should avoid using strict guidelines and set rules as much as possible during play.

So really there is not a lot to take away from this table from a purely strategic perspective. Nonetheless it's interesting to see how specific starting hands compare to one another based on their preflop value.

If you're really after a starting hand strategy guideline, try the Chen Formula.

Sklansky and Malmuth hand rankings evaluation.

No Limit Texas Hold'em Hand Rankings

Although it's a very popular hand group rankings table, it's not going to do you too much good to learn the whole thing off by heart. In my opinion, the real value of this table is being able to see how different starting hands can be grouped together and ranked based on their value before the flop.

For other useful charts and tables, see the odds charts page from the Texas Hold'em tools section.

Go back to the awesome Texas Hold'em Strategy.

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