USA Friendly Room! Starting Hands Chart For Texas Holdem
This is a must know chart to review and memorize.Weather you are a beginner or a pro knowing the starting hand chart is a great guide on hand strength and position.
Stack Sizes
Believe it or not size does actually matter quite a bit in poker. It completely changes what you can do and how you can play. Some may tell you that your stack size should not affect your play, but that is just wrong. There is nothing you can do about it. Naturally if you have a bigger stack you are going to play different then if you have a smaller stack. Some parts of your game shouldn’t change, but a lot of it should.
The kind of game you are playing in has a lot to do with what you would do with different stack sizes. Your stack size matters a lot more in a tournament then it does in a ring game. When you start to get low and become a short stack it is time to make a move. It is hard to say when the right time is to make a move because you do not want to rush and give up your chips, but at the same time you need to have some impact in the bet you are making.
When it comes down to making a stand when you have a smaller stack, you don’t want everyone to call you. If you wait until you have almost nothing left then you are sure to lose, and even if you win you won’t win much. Your all in move needs to make an impact and make your opponents have to think about calling or not. You also don’t want to make a stand with a hand like Ace 4 or any other ace with a low card. The reason is because anyone that calls you is going to probably have an Ace with a higher kicker which gives you a very good chance of losing what is left of your stack. You want to make sure that you have live cards when you are risking your chips.
The more comfortable position to be in is the one with a large stack. A lot of people will say to you when you are the big stack that you should always call the all ins because you are the big stack. Well, that is just foolish and a quick way to lose your big stack. If you want to keep the lead and use all of those chips to your advantage then you will pick your spots.
When you are the chip leader or you have a large chip stack you should get into more hands and see more flops. The hard part however, is to balance that out with not getting into trouble. You want to give yourself the chance to take out more players and catch more hands; but you don’t want to start chasing and playing every hand down to the end. Just because you have a lot of chips don’t mean you can’t lose them faster then you got them.
Remember that poker is a crazy and unpredictable game. Your stack size can become another player’s stack size in the matter of one hand. If you are a small stack then you can easily become a large one. In order for that to happen the large one is probably going to end up becoming smaller. While your stack size should affect your play, you still must not make bad decisions just because of the size of your stack.