Texas Hold'em Starting Hands: What to Play, and From Where

The single most valuable pre-flop skill isn't reading opponents — it's not entering pots you shouldn't. Position decides how wide you can afford to play: acting first means playing tightest, because more players get to act (and raise) after you; acting last means you can open more hands profitably, because you see everyone else's move before you commit. This chart lays out, for all 169 starting hands, whether the mathematically indicated play is to raise, call, or fold — by position.

Table assumed: full-ring, 9-handed, no action in front of you except in the blinds panel. Seats are grouped into the four buckets the trainer's own engine uses — early (UTG–UTG+2), middle (MP1–MP3), late (cutoff, button), and the blinds (SB/BB) — rather than a chart per exact seat, since the strategy shift within a group is small next to the shift between groups.

Basis, so nothing here is invented: every cell comes from the Chen formula — a published starting-hand scoring system (Bill Chen; AA scores 20, 72o scores about −2) — compared against a raise/call floor per position. Neither the formula nor the floors are new for this page: they're the exact numbers the live trainer already uses to grade your pre-flop decisions in the "Why?" tutor, unchanged, and covered by the engine's own test suite. This page only adds the full 13×13 grid view — it can't drift from what the trainer teaches because it calls the same function.

How to read it: find your two cards where their ranks cross. The diagonal is pairs (AA, KK, ...). Above the diagonal is suited (AKs — both cards the same suit); below is offsuit (AKo — different suits). "T" is Ten. The color is the play: raise to open the pot, call to see a flop cheaply (or defend a blind already in), or fold. The blinds panel assumes you're already reacting to an open in front of you, not opening cold — which is why it raises about as tightly as early position but calls about as widely as late position: you need a real hand to 3-bet, but you're already partly invested, so defending is cheap.

This chart is deliberately conservative about what it claims: the Chen formula is a fast, hand-checkable heuristic, not a solved-game GTO output, and it says nothing about reads, stack depths, or how loose your particular table is playing. What it gets right every time is the thing beginners get wrong most often — folding trash from early position instead of "seeing what happens," and not being afraid to open wider once you're on the button. Get pre-flop right and postflop gets a lot easier to learn.

Once you're in the hand, the next decision is pricing your draws — see pot odds & outs. Playing a different game at the table? There's also the blackjack basic strategy chart.