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Starting Hand Selection:Chen Formula : Sklansky Starting Hand Groups

The Sklansky & Malmuth starting hands table.

The strength of our preflop holding depends on the scenario we face, and the many different situations we can find ourselves in. Let’s go over a few examples. The Situation is Important! We’ve essentially focused on the strength of one preflop starting hand relative to another preflop starting hand.

This table comes from the book Hold 'em Poker for Advanced Players by David Sklansky and Mason Malmuth.

This is a strategy book for limit Hold'em, but the starting hand groups do have some practical use in no limit Hold'em.

What is the Sklansky and Malmuth starting hands table?

The table is a general ranking of hands in Texas Hold'em.

The Sklansky and Malmuth starting hands table groups together certain hands in Texas Hold'em based on their strength. Starting with the strongest set of hands that you can be dealt in group 1, the hands get progressively weaker working down the table until the virtually unplayable hands in group 9.

The rough idea is that a hand in one group has roughly the same value and can be played the same way preflop as any other hand in that group.

How to use the starting hands table.

In their book, Sklansky and Malmuth provide some in-depth guidelines for starting hand strategy in limit Texas Hold'em using this table. Unfortunately, I'm not going to work out any guidelines for you for the NL Hold'em game using this table because:

1. It would be quite a tricky job.
2. It would be difficult to remember and implement.
3. Like any starting hand strategy, it would have its flaws.
4. You should avoid using strict guidelines and set rules as much as possible during play.

So really there is not a lot to take away from this table from a purely strategic perspective. Nonetheless it's interesting to see how specific starting hands compare to one another based on their preflop value.

If you're really after a starting hand strategy guideline, try the Chen Formula.

Sklansky and Malmuth hand rankings evaluation.

Although it's a very popular hand group rankings table, it's not going to do you too much good to learn the whole thing off by heart. In my opinion, the real value of this table is being able to see how different starting hands can be grouped together and ranked based on their value before the flop.

For other useful charts and tables, see the odds charts page from the Texas Hold'em tools section.

Go back to the awesome Texas Hold'em Strategy.

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Comments

Poker Hands Chart

Starting hands in Pot-Limit Omaha are grouped by structure. With so many possible 4-card combinations it is actually the suits, closeness of the cards and pairs as well as the high card strength that makes the difference between a strong starting hand and a weak one. Add to this the fact that seemingly insignificant differences – for example a gap at the top end of your connected middle cards compared to a gap at the bottom end – make a huge difference and it is difficult to come up with some simple ‘cut off point’ between good and poor hands in the same way we do in Holdem.

Of course, many players new to Omaha look for a PLO starting hand chart first – these are common in Holdem, so why not for Omaha!
I am happy to be publishing a contribution from a reader today, the following Omaha starting hands chart was put together by Anthony, from Ashburn VA – an Omaha fan with a genuine will to help people new to the game.

This chart is based on Jeff Hwang’s playing guidelines, the position and raise / fold percentages are based on deep-stacked play and full-ring tables. Adapting this for 6-max games should be straight forward enough for motivated readers, you are starting in Mid-Position compared to a full table and should be raising a lot from the cut-off and button positions.

Click the graphic below to see the full chart. Your feedback is welcomed, particularly on how this could be adapted for different situations and stack sizes, mail us at [email protected] anytime.

Suggested Starting Hand Structures – based on deepstack FR games, should be adjusted for 6max

Poker Hands Order Of Strength

Just like to close with my thanks to Anthony for these charts – you can contact him at the following address ashburnpokerclub (at sign) gmail.comands are playable while others are not check out the following guides: