The First Two Cards

In Texas Hold’em you start off with two pocket cards. The first two cards is the only thing that you know for sure in the first betting round. Assessing the value of the two starting cards is crucial to your success at the poker tables. Are the cards good enough for you to justify seeing the flop? Do these cards hold up for making an investment in the pot?

Whether or not to see the flop is generally the most important decision you make in Texas Hold’em. It is a decision of whether or not to get involved, using the fact that you can choose your battles. It is also a decision that you have to make each and every hand that you play.

So it is important to understand how good the first two cards are. Fortunately this is not as hard as you might think at first. Although there are 1326 possible different combinations of cards that you can be dealt, there are only 169 unique hands as it does not matter which suits your pair of nines have. Furthermore you can group a lot of hands together, thinking about them in a similar manner. And a lot of starting hands are so bad that you do not have think about them at all.

Understanding the value of starting hands can be done in two different ways. All combinations of cards can be categorized by the way they fit together and a ranking of the best hands can be utilized. Where the latter is a great resource while sitting down at the table.

The next article will explain how the starting hands fit together as it provides an understanding for the game post-flop as well. Thereafter an A-list of starting hands is presented. These are starting hands that you can not go wrong with pre-flop. They are starting hands that can take the heat.