Poker cheat sheet: hands, odds and the tools worth using

Hand rankings, strongest first

This is the part worth memorising first, because every other decision depends on it. In standard poker the suits do not rank against each other: if two players hold the same hand with different suits, the pot is split.

Two details trip people up. The ace plays both high and low in a straight, so A-2-3-4-5 is a legitimate straight (the "wheel"), but it is the lowest one and loses to 2-3-4-5-6. And a straight does not wrap around: Q-K-A-2-3 is nothing at all. If any of that is new, the full walk-through lives on the rules page rather than here.

Positions, so the chart below makes sense

A starting hand chart is meaningless without seats, because the same two cards are a raise in one seat and a fold in another. The reason is simple: the later you act, the more information you have when it is your turn, and the fewer players are left behind you who might wake up with something.

The button is the most profitable seat at the table and the small blind is the least, and that gap is larger than the gap between most starting hands. If you remember one thing from this page, make it that one.

Starting hand chart

Notation first: s means suited (both cards the same suit), o means offsuit, and a plus sign means that hand and everything above it. So "TT+" is tens, jacks, queens, kings and aces, and "A9s+" is A9 suited through AK suited.

This chart is a teaching baseline for a six-handed no-limit Hold'em game, not a solved solution. Published ranges differ from each other at the edges, and every serious player adjusts to the table. Play it as written until you understand why each line is where it is, then start deviating on purpose.

Three notes that matter more than the chart itself. Everything above assumes nobody has raised in front of you; against a raise you need a stronger hand than the one that would have opened. Suited cards are worth meaningfully more than the same cards offsuit, which is why A9s appears three rows above A9o. And small pairs are drawing hands: they want cheap flops and a lot of players, because they flop a set only about once in eight tries.

Outs and the rule of 2 and 4

An "out" is a card that turns a losing hand into a winning one. Count them, then convert the count to a percentage. On the flop, with two cards still to come, multiply your outs by four. On the turn, with one card to come, multiply by two. That shortcut is close enough to be used in your head at the table.

The right-hand column is the one people misuse. You only get both cards for free if you or your opponent is already all in. If there is another betting round coming, use the "next card" column, because you will have to pay again on the turn to see the river.

Also discount your outs when the board is scary. Nine flush outs are not nine clean outs if the board is paired, because a card that completes your flush can also fill somebody's full house. Counting outs honestly is a skill in itself.

Pot odds: the only maths you need mid-hand

Pot odds compare what a call costs you to what you stand to win. If the equity in the previous table is bigger than the percentage in this one, calling is profitable in the long run. If it is smaller, folding is.

Worked example. The pot is RM100 and your opponent bets RM50, so you are calling RM50 to win RM150 and you need to be right 25% of the time. You hold a flush draw, which is nine outs, or about 19% on the next card. Strictly on pot odds that is a fold.

In practice it often is not, because of implied odds: the extra money you expect to win on later streets when you do hit. If your opponent is the sort who pays off a completed flush with a big bet on the river, the extra RM100 you collect on those occasions can turn the call profitable. Implied odds are real, but they are also the excuse people use to justify every bad call, so be strict about whether the money is genuinely there.

Numbers worth memorising

The middle two lines explain most of the frustration beginners feel. You miss the flop entirely about two-thirds of the time with an unpaired hand, and so does everybody else. That is not bad luck, it is the game, and it is the reason position and aggression matter more than card strength.

Odds and equity calculators

An odds calculator takes a hand and a board and tells you how often it wins against another hand or against a range of hands. It is doing the same arithmetic as the tables above, just faster and for situations too messy to do in your head, such as a pair against a flush draw against two overcards.

Used well, a calculator is a training tool rather than a playing tool. Run the hands you were unsure about after the session, see how far off your estimate was, and after a few dozen hands your at-table estimates get noticeably better. That is the entire benefit, and it is a real one.

Equity calculators are the same idea against a range rather than a single hand, which is closer to how a real decision feels. You rarely know your opponent has exactly ace-king; you think they have one of maybe thirty hands. Being able to check how your hand does against that whole group is where the learning happens.

Solvers and GTO trainers, honestly

A solver takes a specific spot, with stack sizes, bet sizes and both ranges defined, and computes a strategy that cannot be exploited. The output is a set of frequencies: raise this hand 68% of the time, call 22%, fold the rest. It is not a cheat sheet and it will not tell you what to do at the table, because you cannot run one while a hand is in progress.

Be realistic about the learning curve. Setting a spot up correctly is most of the skill, and a solver answers exactly the question you asked, which means a badly framed question gives a confidently wrong answer. Beginners who buy one typically get very little from it, not because the tool is bad but because the bottleneck is elsewhere — usually hand selection, position and bet sizing, all of which are already covered by the charts on this page.

The reasonable order is: learn the rankings, play a tight range from good positions, understand pot odds, review your own hands, and only then look at solver output for the two or three spots that keep costing you money. GTO trainers, which quiz you against solver-derived strategies, are a gentler way in than raw solver software.

Tracking software and HUDs

A tracker imports your hand histories and builds a database of your own results and your opponents' tendencies. The head-up display, or HUD, projects a few of those statistics onto the table so you can see that the player on your left folds to a raise 78% of the time.

The genuinely valuable half is the review half. Filtering your own database for every hand where you called a river bet and lost is a far better use of an evening than watching a HUD. Many rooms now restrict or ban HUDs anyway, and a growing number anonymise player names specifically to make them useless, so treat tracking as a study tool rather than an edge.

The line you cannot cross

Real-time assistance software (anything that reads the table and tells you what to do while the hand is live) is banned by every legitimate poker room. That includes solvers running alongside the client, preflop chart overlays that respond to the actual hand, bots, and seating scripts that hunt weak players.

The consequences are not a warning. Rooms confiscate balances, close accounts and redistribute the seized funds to the players who were cheated, and they publish the names. There is no grey area worth exploring here: study away from the table, and play the hand yourself.

A paper cheat sheet next to your keyboard is a different thing entirely. Fixed reference material that does not react to the hand in progress is allowed everywhere, which is why the charts above are written to be readable at a glance rather than looked up.

Which tool, and when

The pattern is that the tools which help you most are the ones that make you review decisions you already made. Anything promising an answer during the hand is either against the rules or against your own development. If you are setting up a home game to practise in, the equipment guide covers what you need on the table itself.

One thing outranks every tool on this page if you are playing online. The software you are playing on decides who holds the balance those trackers are measuring, and a licensed room, a club app and an agent-run table are not the same thing at all. What you are actually joining when you install a poker app is worth reading before you buy anything else.