Online Poker Strategy > Winning Poker Strategy Guide > 2.5 Poker Starting Hands
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2.5 Poker Starting Hands
Now that you understand the importance of position and aggression, we are going to look at which poker starting hands we are going to play and in which position.
First of all print out our Poker Starting hand chart, or set one of our wallpapers as your desktop, as this will be a key reference tool for you.
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POKER STARTING HAND CHART |  |
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| Printable Format | pdf version | ||
| Desktop Wallpaper | 1152 x 864 | ||
| 1280 x 1024 | |||
| Right Click on link and select Save Target As | |||
| Printable Format | Desktop Wallpaper | ||
Printable Format - To view and print this you will need Adobe Reader. If you don't have this you can download your free copy of it here
Desktop Wallpaper - Select the wallpaper depending on the screen size you have setup on your computer. Once selected save the downloaded file to your desktop, right click on the image and select preview, when the image is open right click on it and select "Set As Desktop Background". The wallpaper is designed so that whilst you are playing poker, you can move the table window over the Poker Professor logo and all the charts will be visable around the poker table.
Starting Hand Groups
Once you have the Starting Hands chart in front of you take a look at the top section. Here we have split the starting hands we are going to play into 8 groups named Group A to Group H.
Group A are the strongest hands in the game, while Group H are more marginal hands.
The little ‘s’ next to some of the hands stands for Suited, so two cards of the same suit
‘AJs’ could stand for A
J
Whereas
‘AJ’ could stand for A
J
Take a minute just to browse the hands in each group, you don’t need to memorise these, as you can use the chart to refer to, and once you have used it for a while, you will start to remember which hands are in which groups.
Action Charts
Look down at the next section of the Starting hand charts, and you will see three tables, UNRAISED, RAISED and BLINDS.
These are our Action charts, and show us what action to take when we have a hand in one of the starting hand groups.
The three charts are:
- UNRAISED - When everybody acting before you has either folded or called the big blind.
- RAISED - When somebody acting before you has raised.
- BLINDS - When you are in either the small blind or the big blind position and somebody acting before you has raised
The different actions in each of the charts are:
| UNRAISED CHART | |
| OPENING RAISE | Make the first Raise |
| CALL A RERAISE | Call when someone Re-Raises your original Raise |
| RAISE A RERAISE | Re-Raise when somebody has Re-Raised your original Raise |
| CALL THE BIG BLIND | Just call the big blind amount also known as ‘limping in’) |
| RAISED / BLINDS CHART | |
| RERAISE | Re-Raise a person who has Raised |
| CALL | Call when a person has Raised |
Continue to next section - 2.5 Poker Starting Hands continued
