In Texas Hold’em, it is important to have good starting hand selection skills to avoid getting into sweats with bad hands that will result in losing money.

“Starting hand selection” is simply picking all the good hands and discarding the bad hands.

While it’s true that any hand can win in Texas Hold’em (and poker in general), the problem is that certain hands will win much more often than others. As a result, we are likely to see better results in the long run if we continue to play good hands.

The basics of choosing starting hands to play: choosing the right starting hands is the foundation of your successful and plus-sized game. Any poker strategy training starts with this. Beginners, and those who have never given the matter much thought, tend to choose hands to play “at random”, often based on what they think is a “nice hand”, such as kh7h or ad6d, or even “I just haven’t dealt in a while”.

However, while any hand has a chance of winning, there are certain poker combinations that you have a much higher chance of winning with, and these combinations are considered top hands when played preflop.

Good cards in Hold’em usually include senior connectors and big pocket pairs that are at the top of the K range. Thus, the leaders of the starting range would be:

• AA
• KK
• QQ
• AKs

This is clearly the highest starting level, and if we were always given only these hands, we could make a lot of money. In fact, it is logical to assume that we would win over the distance if we gave up these premiums. However, this strategy would only be effective at small limits, where other players would likely not notice that we were only playing premium.

The second level of betting: if we were to limit ourselves to playing with this elite range, we would have to lose a great many of the other hands, which would deprive us of other opportunities to make money. Even though these two percent are the best of the starting hands, there are many excellent hands that, if we play them, we can make a lot of money over the distance.