Starting hands

There are 169 different starting hands: 13 pocket pairs, 78 suited hands and 78 offsuit hands. You do not have to memorise them one by one. They fall into a few families, and each family has a personality.

Pocket pairs are already a made hand. The big ones (TT and up) dominate before the flop; the small ones need to hit a set or to be all-in against two overcards, where they are a slight favourite.

Broadways are two cards from ten to ace. They make top pair with a good kicker and they block the hands your opponents want to play with. Three-handed, they are the backbone of every raising range.

Suited aces and suited connectors are the speculative hands: they rarely win at showdown unimproved, but they make flushes and straights. Their value drops fast when the stacks get short, because there is no room to see a flop cheaply.

Three-handed, you only have to beat two hands, not five or eight: an average hand is worth much more than at a full table. K9o, Q8s or A5o, folds at a full table, are normal raises from the button.

What suited is really worth

Two suited cards make a flush only about 6 % of the time by the river. Suitedness adds two or three points of equity, not twenty. It matters at the edges of a range, where it turns a fold into a call, and it never turns a bad hand into a good one.