3 of the Best and Worst Starting Hands for Texas Hold’Em Poker

Texas Hold’Em is one of the most popular poker variant games out there. There isn’t a soul that doesn’t know how to play it or that hasn’t tried it, just the once.

According to professionals, one of the keys to master this variant of poker is knowing just how good your starting hand is. The hand will tell you if you can proceed with your bets, or is it a good thing to just follow the game without making big bets at all. Knowing how good of a hand you have can save you from losing too much money, and those who can evaluate the hand they have been dealt are the best players.

Poker is a game for everyone, and so many of us are just starting and making all kinds of rookie mistakes, which is entirely normal. One of the biggest rookie mistakes is playing too many hands. For a rookie, it is imperative to play only good hands and to stay away from going for every single game, hoping to get something on the flop. It is nice when you manage to match up to anything there, but most of the time, you will be wasting money and drying yourself out before you manage to hit it big.

Thanks to lasvegascasino.com, we have compiled a list of good and bad hands in Texas Hold’Em so you would know when to follow up and when to fold!

Good hands

Pair of Aces

This hand is probably the best hand you could hold in this game, also called bullets. You have around an 85% chance that this hand will hold out in the long run but believe it or not, many hands that can break it. One thing to note is that fewer players are at the table, those statistical chances increase, and more chance you have holding up to the showdown. This is a thing that professionals are always aware and you should as well. Keeping track of your opponents at the table and in the game is only a part of it but a huge part.

High suited connectors

High suited connectors are also an excellent hand you can have. An example of that is Ace and King of spades suited, and these cards are good because they give you a statistically significant chance of getting a flush, straight or even matching those cards to another and having a high pair. Another possibility is getting a Full House or a Royal Flush which is a hand that everyone is searching for every game. Still, you have to know that having these Suited connectors puts you in an excellent opportunity to build a solid hand.

High off suite connectors

This type of hands means that you get Jack and Ten, King and Queen or even Ace-King, but they are off the suit with each other. These cards are also good because you have a distinct possibility of forming a really strong hand with a straight or even matching one of these cards and having a high pair. Interestingly, when you are off suit, you lose the possibility of getting a flush. With these cards, anything below a Ten puts you in a position where the odds are well against you, and you will likely be beaten by a stronger face card or an Ace.

Bad hands

Low off suite, off sequence cards

To explain this quickly, we will take an example of the Three and Nine combos off suite. It is a poor hand that can’t produce anything good short term or long term. Here you have a low card, and your high card is not even that high. There is nothing from this that you can produce or match up to get any high chance of winning the pot. Unless you are a bluffing master, but that is something to discuss in another article. What is even worse is that there are worse cards than these. Imagine Two and Seven off suite—no chance of a flush, no chance of a straight, no chance to win, period.

High card low card combo

If you get dealt a High card like an Ace, and a low card like Two, do not run to follow that hand through just because you have an Ace. The reality is that you also have a low card that is a Two, and although they are a foundation for a low straight, they simply are not that good. Another similar situation is, for example, a King and Three combos where you have a high card, but that Three is destroying your game because if your opponent has the same high card and anything above that Three, you are gone.

Fancy named cards are not that good

Game of poker boasts many names for hands, and most rookies tend to fall victim to those fancy hand names thinking that they are good. For example, you have pairs called deuces, a pair of Twos, high five, where you have an Ace and a Five, Jack Daniels – Jack and a Seven.

These are all cool names for these hands, but these are not that good, and you will not get far with these hands eight times out of 10. We tend to believe that just because a hand has a cool nickname that it is a strong one, the logic behind that is that only strong hands used to get nicknames, but a hand called Jackson five with Jack and Five is pretty much a lousy hand due to the facts we explained before.

In the end, we hope that you have had fun reading this article, and most importantly, we hope that if you are a newcomer to Texas Hold’Em that you learned something. The best way to test what we wrote here is to sit with your friends, apply these rules, and see where you land. Like always, stay safe and gamble responsibly. Best of luck to you all!