Number Of Poker Starting Hands

• Poker Starting Hand Chart
• Poker Starting Hand Guide
• Number Of Poker Starting Hands Against
• Number Of Poker Starting Hands Games

However, since the increase in hand strength is minimal (never more than 3-4%) I often simplify the starting hand number down to 91 when teaching beginners the game of Texas Hold’em. It sounds a bit less daunting to spin it as, “less than 100 hands”. In Texas Hold’em, there are 169 unique combinations of preflop starting hands you can be dealt. This number is arrived at by grouping holdings into pairs, suited cards and offsuit cards, and considering that preflop specific suits (e.g. Hearts vs diamonds) don’t yet have value.

If you assume any two suited pair of the same rank are the same, then poker has 169 two-card starting hand combinations. Only a handful of those starting hand values are considered premium. The rest are problematic, so good poker players learn how to mitigate those problems by folding their cards a lot. Five Types of Starting Hands. Hands without a number are the weakest starting hands. As a general rule, books on Texas hold'em present hand strengths starting with the assumption of a nine or ten person table. The table below illustrates the concept: Chen formula. The 'Chen Formula' is a way to compute the 'power ratings' of starting hands that was originally developed. There are 1,326 possible combinations of cards from a standard deck but there are only 169 non-equivalent starting hands in poker. This number is made up of 13 pocket pairs, 78 suited hands and 78.

Being a supplier of poker chips we are often asked what a good breakdown is for a poker game. Our immediate response is normally, “it depends”. Is it a cash game or tournament? How many chips do your players like to have in front of them? Do you ever see your stakes rising in the future? How deep do your players get by the end of the night?

Dia de los Muertos poker chips
There are many factors to consider when figuring out a breakdown of chips for your poker game. Make sure to consider them all. Take some time and work out your breakdown in writing so you can visualize the chips being used.
Let’s consider a poker game that is only a tournament. This is the most common type of game that is being played in home games.
Try to not think about just how many “chips” that a player starts with. You can have a player start with 100,000 chips but if the blinds are 1000/2000 in the first level they will have shorter stacks compared to a player that starts with 5000 chips with the first blinds being 25/50. In the first situation the player starts with 50 big blinds while in the second situation the player starts with 100 big blinds. That is a big difference!
So, try to think about how many big blinds (BB) you want each player to start with. A good rule of thumb is that most tournaments start with 50-100 BBs but some players prefer deep-stack tournaments that start with 100+ BBs.
Now, consider how many actual physical chips you want each player to start with. Most players like to have a HUGE stack in front of them, but you have to realize that players need to start with a smaller stack or else you will have to purchase a very large number of chips. In a normal home game tournament players will start with 20-30 chips.
Tournament
Finally, consider how many players you will have in your tournaments and how long the tournament will normally last. If there are a lot of players (20+ players) it will mean that there will be a lot of initial chips on the tables. There will be so many chips that you will have to “color up” the lower denomination chips at some point during the tournament. So, you will need to have higher denomination chips than the initial starting poker chips.
Let’s look at an example set up:
Total players: 20
Starting blinds: 25/50
Starting stack: 5000 (100 BB)
Number of poker chips to start with: 21
Initial chips that each player has in front of them:

• 4 – “25” chips = 100
• 9 – “100” chips = 900
• 8 – “500” chips = 4000

Starting stack of our Nevada Jack Skulls poker chips.

• 20 – “100” chips

• 30 – “25” chips
• 20 – “100” chips
• 10 – “500” chips

• 110 – “25” chips
• 220 – “100” chips
• 170 – “500” chips
• 500 total poker chips

• 15 - $1 chips = $15
• 17 - $5 chips = $85
• 4 - $25 chips = $100
• Total – 36 chips = $200

• 100 - $5 chips = $500
• 20 - $25 chips = $500
• 10 - $100 chips = $1000

• 80 - $25 chips = $2000
• 30 - $100 chips = $3000

• 50 - $1 chips
• 50 - $5 chips

Poker in 2018 is as competitive as it has ever been. Long gone are the days of being able to print money playing a basic ABC strategy.

Today your average winning poker player has many tricks in their bags and tools in their arsenals. Imagine a soldier going into the heat of battle. Without his weapons, he is practically useless, and chances of survival are extremely low.

If you sit down at a poker table without any preparation or general understanding of poker fundamentals, the sharks are going to eat you alive. Sure you may get lucky once in a blue moon, but over the long term, things won’t end well.

With the evolution of poker strategy, you now have many tools at your disposal. Whether it be online poker training sites, free YouTube content, poker coaching, or poker vlogs, there’s no excuse to be a fish in today's game.

Some of the essential fundamentals you need to be utilizing that every poker player should have in their bag of tricks whether you are a Tournament or Cash Game Player are concepts such as hand combinations (Also known as hand combinatorics or hand combos).

Hand Combinations and Hand Reading

If you were to analyze a large sample of successful poker players you would notice that they all have one skill set in common: Hand Reading

What does hand reading have to do with hand combinations you might ask?

Well, poker is a game of deduction and to be a good hand reader, you need to be good at correctly ranging your opponents.

Once you have assigned them a range, you will then need to start narrowing that range down. Combinatorics is one of the ways we do this.

So what is combinatorics? It may sound like rocket science and it is definitely a bit more complex than some other poker concepts, but once you get the hang of combinatorics it will take your game to the next level.

Combinatorics is essentially understanding how many combos each of your opponent's potential holdings are and deducing their potential holdings utilizing concepts such as removal and blockers.

There are 52 cards in a deck, 13 of each suit, and 4 of each rank with 1326 poker hands in total. To simplify things just focus on memorizing all of the potential combos to start:

• 16 possible hand combinations of every unpaired hand
• 12 combinations of every unpaired offsuit hand
• 4 combinations of each suited hand
• 6 possible combinations of pocket pairs

Here is a short video example of using combinatorics to count the number of ways a non-paired hand AK can be arranged (i.e. how many combos there are):

So now that we have this memorized, let's look at a hand example and how we can apply combinatorics in game.

We hold A♣Q♣ in the SB and 3bet the BTN’s open to 10bb with 100bb stacks. He flats and we go heads up to a flop of

A♠ 5♦ 4♦

We check and our opponent checks back with 21bb in the middle

Turn is the 4♥

We bet 10bb and our opponent calls for a total pot of 41bb

The river brings the 9♠

So the final board reads

A♠ 5♦ 4♦ 4♥ 9♠

We bet 21bb and our opponent jams all in leaving us with 59bb to call into a pot of 162bb resulting in needing at least 36% pot equity to win.

Our opponent is representing a polarized range here. He is either nutted or representing missed draws so we find ourself in a tough spot. This is where utilizing combinatorics to deduce his value hands vs bluffs come into play. Now we need to narrow down his range given our line and his line. Let's take a look at how we do this...

Poker Starting Hand Chart

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Blockers and Card Removal Effects

First, let's take a look at the hands we BLOCK and DON’T BLOCK

Since we hold an Ace in our hand and there is an Ace on the board, that only leaves 2 Ace’s left in the deck. So there is exactly 1 combo of AA.

We BLOCK most of the Aces he can be holding, so we can REMOVE some Aces from his range.

We do not BLOCK the A♦ as we hold A♣Q♣, and the A on the board is a spade, so it is still possible for him to have some A♦x♦ hands.

We checked flop to add strength to our check call range (although a bet with a plan to triple barrel is equally valid in this situation SB vs BTN) and because of this our opponent may not put us on an A here.

If he is a thinking player his jam can exploit our thin value bet on the river turning his missed straight/flush draws into a bluff to get us to fold our big pocket pairs and even make it a tough call with our perceived weak holdings.

The problem in giving him significant credit for this part of his bluffing range is the question of would he really shove here with good SDV (Showdown Value)?

These are the types of questions we must ask ourselves to further deduce his range along with applying the combinatoric information we now have.

Now, let's look at all the nutted Ax hands our opponent can have.

If he has a nutted hand like A4 or A5, and we assume he is only calling 3bets with Axs type hands, the only suited combo of those hands he can have are exactly A♥5♥. He can’t have A♦5♦ or A♦4♦ because the 4 and the 5 are both diamonds on the board blocks these hands.

Lets take a look at all of this value hands:

There is only 1 combo of 44 left in the deck, 2 combos of A9s, 3 Combos of 55, 3 Combos of 99, 2 Combos of 45s - some of these hands may also be bet on the flop when facing a check.

So to recap we have:

1 Combo A5s, 2 Combos of A9s, 3 Combos of 55 (With one 5 on board, the number of combinations of 55 are cut in half from 6 combos to 3 combos), 1 Combo of 44, 2 Combos of 45s, 3 Combos of 99

Total: 12 Value Combos

Now we need to look at our opponent's potential bluffs

Based on the villain's image, this is the range of bluffs we assigned him:

Poker Starting Hand Guide

K♦Q♦(1 Combo), J♦T♦ (1 Combo), T♦9♦ (1 Combo), 67s (4 Combos)

He may also turn some other random hands with little showdown value into bluffs such as A♦2♦/A♦3♦

Number Of Poker Starting Hands Against

Total: 9 Bluff Combos

9(Bluff Combos) + 12(Value Combos) = 22

9/21 = 42% of the time our opponent will be bluffing (assuming he always bets this entire range)

11/21 = 58% of the time our opponent will be value raising

Now, this is the range we assigned him in game based on the action and what we perceived our opponents range to be.

We are not always correct in applying the exact range of his potential holdings, but so long as you are in the ballpark of that range you can still make quite a few deductions to put yourself in the position to make the correct final decision.

According to the range we assigned him, he has 11 Value Combos and 9 Bluff Combos which gives us equity of 42%. This would result in a positive expected value call as we only need 36% pot odds to call.

However, unless you are playing against very tough opponents you will not see someone bluffing all 9 combos we have assigned - most likely they will bluff in the range of 4-6 combos on average which gives equity in the range of 20-30% equity. This is not enough to call.

Number Of Poker Starting Hands Games

We ultimately made our decision based on the fact that we felt our opponent was much less likely to jam with his bluffs in this spot. Given that it was already a close decision to begin with, we managed to find what ended up being the correct fold.

Now this all may seem a bit overwhelming, but if you just start taking an extra minute on your big decisions you’d be surprised how quickly you can actually process all this information on this spot.

A good starting point is to simply memorize all of the possible hand combinations listed above near the beginning of the article.

Get access to our 30-minute lesson on Combinatorics and PokerStove by clicking on one of the buttons below:

Conclusion On Combinatorics

Eventually accounting for your opponent's combos in a hand will become second nature. To get to the point that , a lot of the work needs to be done off the table and in the lab. As you spend more time studying it and reviewing hand histories like the one above, you will find yourself intuitively and almost subconsciously using combinatorics in your decision making tree.

But the work will be worth the effort, as being able to count combos on the fly will add a new dimension to your game, allow you to make more educated decisions, become a tougher opponent to play against and move away from playing ABC poker.

Want more content like the ones in this blog post on poker combinatorics? Check out our Road to Success Course where we have almost 100 videos like this to help take your game to the next level. You can also get the first module of the Road To Success Course for Free - for more details see the free poker training videos page by TopPokerValue.com.