Poker starting hands
Every starting poker hand, and how to play it
Click any gold box below to see the guides, hand breakdowns and podcast episodes written about that hand, or browse by hand family on the right.
Click any highlighted box to read about that hand. Solid gold boxes like JJ have their own article. Pale gold boxes like 33 are covered by a hand family guide. Grey boxes have nothing written about them yet.
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All hand articles
Pocket pairs
- Pocket aces
- Pocket kings
- Level Up: pocket kings
- Pocket queens
- Pocket jacks
- Pocket tens
- Pocket nines
- Pocket eights
- Pocket sevens
- Pocket sixes
- Pocket sixes at a $1K final table
- Pocket fives
- Pocket fours
- Pocket threes
- Pocket twos
- Big pocket pairs
- Low pocket pairs
- Small pocket pairs in tournaments
- Set mining
- Pocket pairs vs a 3-bet
Suited aces
Suited kings, queens and jacks
Suited connectors and gappers
- Suited connectors: 5 mistakes
- Suited gappers
- Jack-ten suited
- Jack-nine suited
- Ten-nine suited
- Ten-eight suited
- Ten-seven suited
- Nine-eight suited
- Nine-seven suited
- Eight-seven suited
- Eight-six suited
- Seven-six suited
- Seven-five suited
- Six-five suited
- Six-four suited
- Five-four suited
- Four-three suited