Starting Hand Basics in Texas Hold'em

We all know that the first round of betting in hold’em is made on the basis of two hole cards. At its most basic level, good starting hands bet here, and bad hands get out of the way. Of course this is not always what happens – often mediocre hands bet with position and ‘drawing hands’ call to see if they can hit a flop, but it is a good idea to filter your starting hands, at least at first, into playable and not-playable, and discuss the grey area in between a bit later.

Starting out playing hold’em, a lot of people go through the Let’s-see-it-all phase, refusing to sit out a hand either because sitting out means getting bored (“I didn’t come to fold”) or because the flop can delightfully turn a bad hand into a big winner. The joy of this occasionally happening leads many beginners to adopt, at least until it’s lost them a pile of cash, one or two ugly hands as ‘favourites’ which are always played (K5, 69, and J5 etc are just I few I’ve heard people praise).

So let’s start with the non-playables. 7-2 offsuit is so much of a classic it appears on as many poker geeks’ T-shirts as AA. You can’t flop a straight or a flush, any of these it can make are of the low variety, and hitting a pair leaves you with a total of one bad pair, one bad kicker. Obviously a folder. Similarly classified: any big-card-little-card combo. I personally hate these more than 7-2, as their potential for getting one into trouble on the flop is much greater. K5, J3, Q6, even A2 (yes, that’s an Ace) go straight in the muck, unless there are mitigating circumstances (late in a tournament any Ace looks pretty good on the button with a short stack, for example). The important questions to ask yourself are, “What am I trying to hit with these non-connected cards?” and then “If I hit, am I going to be winning?” and then, “What kind of hand am I beating anyway?”

“But what about bluffing?” I hear people say. It’s true that the value of your hand is irrelevant if you can convince everyone else that it’s a winner, but if your read on your opponents is so good that you can tell if they’ve hit the flop or can be pushed off, then you may as well not look at your cards as play these horrible starting hands with the knowledge that that’s what they are.

Jumping straight to the top of the food chain: big pairs (AA, KK, QQ) and AK, the hands which are always worth betting preflop in order to shorten the field and keep their high-card advantage as much as possible. In hold’em, the preflop big pair may well win a hand on its own merits without any help from the communal cards. Imagine a game with twenty players, and you get AA. Would you rather everybody saw the flop, or just one or two opponents? In the long term, I wouldn’t care how many people want to take on the best starting hand, but in the short term, your edge is smaller the more live cards are out there against you. Avoid the tilt-inducing cracking of your best hands by raising preflop.

Pocket 10s downwards form a sliding scale of playability dependent on position, action in front of you, and, in tournaments, stack size and type of opponent lurking behind. For some people, a pocket pair is a pocket pair, and 66, 99, 55 and 22 are all much the same. “Calling to hit a set” is a blanket beneath which hide lots of bad calls; in a multiway pot with several limpers or callers of a little raise, there’s nothing wrong with taking a stab at a flop, as it’s so nice to hit one of those near-invisible small sets against, ideally, an overpair. A ‘little overpair’ (say, 99 on a 3 4 6 flop) can also cause over-confidence and a big loss to a bigger pocket pair, or in this case, a wide variety of hands. I recommend starting out by treating these little pairs as the low rung on the poker hand-ranking ladder they are, and tread cautiously if you miss the flop.

AK and other Aces: In a pot limit cash game, I once dealt two players AA and AK respectively. By the time it came to the third pre-flop re-raise, these two remaining players were nearly all-in. The AK put in the final raise which the delighted AA called in a flash, saying, “Sorry if you have Kings, mate.” The AK lost, as it usually will, and you are left with an example of why AK is not a hand to bet the farm on in a cash game. Not because you might be up against a monster (if you always worry about that, poker is not the game for you) but because any pair in that situation (all-in preflop) is on the right side of a near 50/50. Any two live cards are near 60/40. To get all the money in preflop is to close the exit having missed your hand, or to give the worse hand a chance to see all five cards and potentially hit the one pair that is needed to win (providing you don’t hit).

People like to instruct, “AK is a drawing hand,” and the reason it is a good one is that whichever pair you hit with it, you have the top kicker. This is true, but it’s a good idea to vary your post flop play if you don’t want people to start guessing correctly when you hold this hand. As you head downwards (AQ, AJ A10 and beyond) the water gets murkier, and by the time you’re at A-rag you’d better be in position or having checked the big blind if you see a flop.

As a general rule, the strength needed in your hand to raise preflop decreases with proximity to the button. In other words, hands which you would probably bin in early position (first, second, third to act) start to become raising possibilities. The reason for this is that if you raise with something like A 9 under the gun, up to nine other players are left to act in front of you. If one of them raises, what then? If you call and see the flop without hitting it, what then? You’re first to act (probably) each time and even if you hit your hand it may be losing – so you’re faced with a series of unpalatable decisions, each of which your opponent gets to see before he has to act. Position is all-important, especially in no-limit hold’em, and starting hands are just one of the areas influenced by where you are in relation to the button on any particular hand.

Suited Aces of all varieties have one thing in common: the flush they make is the nut flush. Seeing a raggy flop, say 3d 6d Jc while holding the Ad 9d gives you a good semibluff opportunity: betting here in position, your opponent might fold, or, if they flat call, you will often be checked-to on the turn, letting you take a free card (if you so decide) to draw again. If you hit it, great; if they hit it, but end up with a worse flush, so much the better.

This leads on to a caveat – just because a hand is suited doesn’t suddenly turn an unplayable hand into a playable one. Learning the hard way with K9 and Q7 suited running into exactly the situation outlined above is the best way to stop playing these hands so hard. There are a whole bunch of other hands (67, KJ, 8 10) which benefit from being suited but need to be handled with care. No one plays 7c8c because they think it’s winning preflop, but to catch a sneaky straight/flush/two pair/big draw which gives them implied odds. “No one will put me on this (insert random little cards)” is not a good enough reason to start playing hands like small suited connectors willy-nilly. It’s best not to get carried away with hands like 9h 10h until you’ve got a good idea of how your opponents play and a solid grasp of how to play genuinely good starting hands.

Picture hands, those made up of two ‘paint’ cards (KQ JK) or hands like 10 J, and especially K 10 look very tempting, but are troublemakers. I’m not overjoyed playing these hands unless I hit the nut straight. People might not go crazy preflop with AJ, but on a Jxx flop they’ll certainly like finding you with KJ or QJ. Especially puzzling to me are the tournament flat calls of big raises with hands like this. What are you beating? If you hit, will you be winning? I tend to avoid calling raises with these hands. Having said that, they are connected, and the pair they make on the flop is likely to be top pair – just don’t forget that while a Royal kicker is a high kicker, it’s not an Ace.

In general, when starting out playing hold’em, it’s better (less expensive, more instructive) to err on the side of tightness. If you’re not in every pot with random cards and your fingers crossed, you’re at liberty to sit back and watch your opponents play. What starting hands do they call/raise with? How do they play on the flop when they hit or miss it? Who bluffs a lot? Who plays tighter than you? This kind of information is always important, and if you pay attention in between all that folding you will start to gather it, instead of ‘learning the hard way.’ Of course, if you’re a rock for hours, that is exactly what you’ll be classified as by all the other players, but you’d be surprised how often someone will take a stab at your very occasional raise anyway, hoping to crack your assumed big hand. Usually they won’t, and the experience gained from playing a few selected hands will be augmented by that careful watching of your opponents.