Basic Texas Hold-Em rules: 1. Two cards are dealt face-down to each player plus a total of five community cards are dealt on the board. Texas Hold-Em has a total of four rounds of betting. Players use any five of the community cards and one, two, or none of their hole. Cards to make a five-card hand. The winner is determined by the player.

Best Hands In Texas Hold'em

Charts ranking the 169 different starting hands in Texas hold'em can be very intriguing, but it's important to remember they are of limited value. In total there are 154 hand types which are not pocket-pairs. 78 of these are suited, 78 of these are offsuit. Since there are 4 combos of every suited hand this results in (78. 4) 312 combos. The 12 combos of every offsuit hand result in (78. 12) 936 combos. The is the best possible hand you can get in standard five-card Poker is called a royal flush. This hand consists of an: ace, king, queen, jack and 10, all of the same suit. If you have a royal flush, you'll want to bet higher because this is a hard hand to beat.

I’ve been asked by a new player to explain how I got to 169 possibilities of starting hands from a previous page. Good question!

In Texas Hold’em poker there are 2,652 possible starting hands. The way that you first get all the possible starting hands is to take the number of cards (52) and multiply that by 51 times.

Remember that the first 2 cards that can be dealt can be anything from the deck. Out of these 2,652 combinations, there may not be different hands though, because the same two cards dealt in two different orders are still the same hand. In the following two examples, you can see that the cards are equal and that there aren’t any differences. Kind of reminds you of algebra in school, huh?

is EQUAL to

is EQUAL to

That reduces the number of hands, 2,652 down by half or 2,652/2 = 1,326.

Still with me? Good.

Now, out of the 1,326 hands, thinking of the samples above, there is a lot of duplication in VALUE of the hands.

The following hands are all equal in VALUE:

is EQUAL to is EQUAL to

Okay, have you digested that? Good. One last thing. Because of the possibility of getting a flush, cards like the following are NOT equal:

is NOT EQUAL

This is because the first two cards have a chance at making a flush and the second two cards not do not have a chance for making a flush.

We need to get the total number of possibly suited starting cards from this bunch so that would be 13 x 12 /2 for a total of 78.

Continuing on, there should be 78 possible suited starting cards and 78 possible non-suited starting cards and 13 possible pairs for a total of 169 cards.

Total Possible Hands In Texas Holdem Game

So looking at it this way, there are 169 possible starting hands in this game. Hopefully I answered the question without making it too confusing.

Any questions? Comments? Please drop me a line and check out the other posts and blog on this site!

Texas Holdem Starting Hands

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