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[FREE] Sample of NLHE Foundations Course: Starting Hand Value
Hey everybody,
Because I'm currently taking sign-ups for my Free No-Limit Hold'em Foundations Course, I thought I'd give you guys an idea of the format of the lessons, their length and relative difficulty. In short, I try to make this information more accessible and easier to actually use at the tables than any real resource I've ever seen before whether it's strategy articles, videos, books or any other type of media.
Let's get started.
How Do You Make Hands in Poker?
There are three basic ways to make hands in poker. You can make hands with pair-based hands (one pair, two pair, three of a kind, full house, four of a kind), flush-based hands or straight-based hands. This gives us three criteria that we can use to decide how strong a starting hand is in hold'em:
1. Pair-based: Pocket pairs, hands with high cards in them.
2. Flush-based: Suited is better than offsuit.
3. Straight-based: Connected is better than unconnected.
The strongest hands will fall into more than one of these categories, but hands from each category will have their own strengths and weaknesses. If you're familiar with these strengths and weaknesses, then you can avoid common leaks right off the bat that will boost your win-rate and get you a lot closer to being a winning player sooner.
Strengths and Weaknesses
Pocket pairs have a major strength in that they can make sets, and sets are ridiculously strong because they are hidden. What I mean by this is that it's very hard to know that your opponent has a set from looking at the board compared to trying to decide if the opponent has a straight or flush based on draws coming in on the turn or river.
They also have a major weakness in that they don't have very much value outside of sets if they're on the lower end of the spectrum (approx. 22-88) because they don't make overpairs very often. If you have a pocket pair that's something like 3rd pair, you'll only have two outs to improve. Having third pair without a pocket pair with something like 87 on a board of AK84 actually has five outs to improve with any eight and any seven, so you can see the difference there.
High-card hands like AK, AQ, KQ, etc. have a huge strength in that they're really easy to play: either you hit your pair or a big draw or you don't. Even if you miss the flop completely, you'll often have a good opportunity to semi-bluff based on having overcards. What this means is that most flops are going to be at least somewhat good for these hands. This is a lot different than something like 87s that is not going to be too happy on the majority of flops (even though it's not a bad starting hand).
Suited hands are always better than their offsuit counterpart. There isn't really a weakness to this. However, low suited cards are often over-rated if they do not have some moderate high-card or straight-based value. For example, 62s is a very poor hand, but 54s is significantly better because of the added ability to make straights. Something like T9s would be tons better than 54s because it also incorporates a degree of high-card value.
Connected hands give you more chances to make straights. However, the same thing goes for these hands as goes for suited hands in that adding another way to make hands drastically increases their strength. Something like QJo is fairly strong because it combines high-card value with connectedness. On the other hand, something like 65o is pretty weak because it doesn't have any other way to make hands.
The bottom line is that high-card hands can play well on their own, but suited or connected hands usually need another way to make a hand to play well (whether it's adding some high-card value or whatever).
Flopping Straights
It's really tricky to understand the difference between certain types of connected hands unless you have a visual. Along these lines, I'm going to take the obvious approach and... give you a visual. If we have a connected hand like T9, imagine the different ways we can flop a straight:
T9876
JT987
QJT98
KQJT9
That's four different ways to flop a straight. So what if we have a one-gapper hand like T8 instead?
T9876
JT987
QJT98
As you can see, we have three ways to flop a straight. That means we lost 25 percent of our chances of flopping a straight. We'll have two ways to flop a straight with a two-gapper like T7 and only one way to flop a straight with a three-gapper like T6.
There's a similar issue that happens if we have a really high or low connected hand. For example, QJ is connected, but you can't make as many straights with it:
QJT98
KQJT9
AKQJT
Now QJ benefits from high-card value, but we want to illustrate that happens to the connected value of this hand. Essentially, it drops down similar to what happens if you had a one-gapper instead of a connected hand.
You won't just get value from these hands by flopping straights: You'll also get value from flopping straight draws. A similar thing happens, however, where you flop a significant number more straight draws with connected hands than one-gappers.
Exercise
Here's an exercise for this free poker lesson: Write out the different ways to flop a straight draw with 87 and 86 like what we did above. Just use an x for the card that doesn't matter for the draw. For example, you could start with 8765x, 9876x... and go from there. Post these answers below.
If you like this lesson and you want to see more, then sign up for my Free No-Limit Hold'em Foundations Course so I can show you how to kick the crap out of everybody you play poker with and stack money to the ceiling.
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