Note that the poker games Pot Limit Omaha and Texas Hold’em both share the same hand rankings format. Poker Hand Rankings Guide. Does a straight beat a flush? Does 2 pair beat a set? Use our poker hands reference chart until you are 100% certain of hand rankings. Poker hands from strongest to weakest. Ever since the early days of Texas holdem poker, players have attempted to analyze and organize the 169 possible two card starting hands found in the game. One traditional way of doing so involves running thousands upon thousands of simulations in which a particular holdem hand is played out against nine random opponent hands.

1. Texas Holdem Winning Hand Order
2. Official Texas Holdem Poker Rules
3. Texas Holdem Poker Hand Rankings Printable Chart
4. Texas Holdem Starting Hands

1. Nov 8, 2013 - Printable Poker Hands Printable-Poker-Hands-Chart.jpg.
2. Poker Hand Rankings Chart. Print out this free poker hand rankings chart – and always know the best winning poker hands. Poker hands are ranked in order from best to worst.

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:

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.

Texas Holdem Winning Hand Order

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:

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:

Official Texas Holdem Poker Rules

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:

Texas Holdem Poker Hand Rankings Printable Chart

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 Starting Hands

So, if you memorize the phonetic alphabet, it becomes easier to memorize the lists as they appear in the text.

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.