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:
Sometimes the best texas hold em hand is made by the five shared cards on their own. If they were 10-10-10-10-A and you had 9-9 your hole cards would not play as there is a four-of-a-kind of higher value already showing. End of the game There are two ways a hand can end. A hand of poker can be won in two ways: either by betting and forcing your opponents to fold or by having the best poker hand at showdown. Poker hands consist of the best five-card hand made up from any combination of the cards you are dealt and the community cards. Texas Holdem Hand Rankings. The following list is ranked from highest five card hand to lowest five card hand. Start reading from the top down and the first hand you find that a player holds is the winning hand. See how to break ties below the hand rankings. Remember that you always make your best five card hand out of. Therefore, we have compiled a list of the best Texas Hold’em hands, so you know exactly which hand is worth a fold, and with which you have a big chance of a top combo. Hand ranking from best to worst: Pocket Aces. The strongest Texas Hold’em hands and the strongest pair that gives you a huge advantage over any player preflop. Suited and connected poker hands make a good prospect of hitting a straight or a flush draw when the flop is rolled out. In Texas Hold’em poker, it has to be both suited and connected for it to be a good hand, otherwise, you’ll be a fool putting money in some trash hands. However, you should take the chance only if the bets are cheap.
Texas Holdem Hands
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:
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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.
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 To Play
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.
Texas Holdem Hand Rankings
So, if you memorize the phonetic alphabet, it becomes easier to memorize the lists as they appear in the text.
Texas Holdem Hands Ranking
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.