What is a Poker Cheat Sheet?

Poker Hand Chart. A starting poker hand chart is helpful for beginner poker players, much like a basic strategy chart is helpful to blackjack players. In fact, new card players should print off a starting hand chart and follow it rigidly at first. This helps you memorize the best hands in Texas Holdem to play throughout your poker career. Poker Starting Hand Chart (6-Max Cash, 100bb) As such, it’s essential only to raise hands that are going to be +EV to start with (for an open-raise). And thanks to the help of poker solvers like PokerSnowie and PioSolver, we can create a baseline for our 6-Max poker starting hand chart. Poker Hands Cheat Sheet: Best Texas Hold em Hands In case you aren't familiar with the hand strengths, and hand rankings of poker check out the printout Texas Holdem hands cheat sheet: Click here to get a high-quality printable pdf version of the Texas Holdem hands cheat sheet.

A poker cheat sheet is a guide to help you learn the absolute basic fundamentals to play solid poker in order to beat micro and low stake games. Like any endeavour, it takes time, experience and regular evaluation to become a master. The idea behind a cheat sheet is that you can refer to it easily to help you make better decisions than you would otherwise. While you have cheat sheets with poker and for example Blackjack, this is not real ‘cheating’. Cheating the casino is not allowed and can get you into trouble.

Hand Rankings

If you are new to poker, you will need to understand the proper hand rankings. The list below should help you understand the respective hand rankings.

Calculating Outs as Odds

To make better decisions, you will want to know the chances of improving your hand and reconciling that with the amount your opponent is betting. The table below should help you see, at a glance, the approximate percentage of you making your hand for the most common scenarios you will find yourself in. After a while, calculating your outs and converting them to odds will become intuitive. In the meantime, feel free to refer to this table.

Hand Selection – Open Raising

Printable Poker Hands Guide Printable

Choosing which hands to play is very important. It’s the first key decision of any poker hand. If you are starting out in poker. The most important thing is to play a selective hand range based on the position you are in. As you lack the post flop skills to profitably make marginal pre flop calls, you will need to be careful about the hands you play. The table below is a guide to hands you can open raise with, if you are first to enter the pot i.e. nobody has raised in front of you. Please note that the table assumes you are opening the hand ranges in the earlier positions too e.g. You open KJ suited in early position therefore you are opening it in mid position too.

Please note I have not assigned a hand range to open raise from the small blind with. I firmly believe this is the worst spot to open raise in Texas Holdem from and don’t think it would be wise to advise a wide open raise range from here. Instead, play very careful from there. Look to minimize how much you lose and let the strong hands do their “talking” so to speak.

Hand Selection – Calling Raises

As you won’t have the pre-flop aggression in the hand when calling a raise, it is important you are calling raises with hands that are at least as equal in value to the likely range your opponent is raising with and preferably with position on them. There is no cheat to knowing what hands you should call player A’s raise with. Instead, think about the type of player raising and act accordingly. In other words, if it is a loose player opening, you can widen the hands you call with as he is opening wider than a tight player. If it is a tight player opening, you should be looking to play less hands or hands that can break him and his premium hands e.g. low pairs.
As a very basic guide consider calling raises with the hands below.

1. Any Pocket Pair
2. A Q off suit
3. A J suited
4. A Q suited
5. A T suited
6. K Q suited

Hand Selection – Re Raising AKA 3 Bet

Starting out, I recommend 3 betting with AK suited, Pocket Queens, Kings and Aces. As you develop and gain experience you will certainly be re raising with other hands but this cheat sheet is purely for the new player playing micro/low stakes poker.

Post Flop Poker

You will quickly learn that playing the flop, turn and river is complex. As you are playing a selective hand range to begin with, you will not be facing as many difficult situations as a more experience player. Check out some tips to follow below.

1. Miss the flop, get out of the way
2. Be wary of straight and flushes if betting gets large
3. Bet 50% or more of the pot when you bet
4. Don’t attempt crazy bluff bets when you are multi way
5. Don’t slowplay your hands, people will call you down at micro stakes so less need for deception
6. Bet your top pair or better hands
7. Don’t get too attached to Ace King if you miss!

Conclusions

This cheat sheet is aimed at the new player coming to poker in 2020 who has no experience but wants to learn quickly. Understanding hand rankings, what hands to play and the basic odds are the most simple and fundamental skills to be a competent player, capable of winning at micro stakes. There is so much more strategy and complexity to Texas Holdem that can take years to master but we hope this cheat sheet will help you at the start of your poker journey. This sheet is designed to help poker players but there are other sites offering a complete guide to finding a new casino in 2020.
I hope you enjoyed this article. Feel free to contact us if you are interested in finding out how we can help you improve your game and bankroll in 2020. You can download our poker cheat sheet below for free or sign up to our poker training video membership by paying below. This gives you 12 months access to all video content for just £49.99.

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Only starting out with poker in 2020?

I remember when I started with poker, I found remembering the important parts of the game challenging.

But your journey can become easier with this printable poker cheat sheet for beginners (I wish I had this when starting out!).

Table Of Contents

• How To Use This Texas Holdem Poker Cheat Sheet.
• How To Use This Pot Odds Cheat Sheet – Facing River Bet Example
• How To Use This Pot Odds Cheat Sheet – Facing Flop Bet Example
• Poker Hands Cheat Sheet: Best Texas Hold em Hands

Poker Cheat Sheet For Texas Holdem:

Download the high-quality Poker Cheat Sheet printable (PDF) version:

The cheat sheet includes hyperlinks for further reading on any material you may not yet know.

Click here for more information on pre-flop and post-flop. We also discuss Texas Holdem bet sizing in the highlighted link.

If you like the cheat sheet, you may also enjoy these these awesome starting hand charts from upswing poker. They are a more detailed version of the starting hands section in the cheat sheet above which supplement it nicely. Amazingly they have been downloaded almost 200,000 times!

How To Use This Texas Holdem Poker Cheat Sheet.

Step 1: Find your hand on the chart (example KT suited)

Step 2: Determine whether you should follow coloured or number schematic.

Either:

• If first to raise (no other player has raised before you), follow the coloured schematic.
• If facing a raise or reraise, follow the numbered schematic.

Note: If playing on a 6max table (6 players as opposed to 9), the yellow coloured hands will also be able to be played from any position.

See the image below for the numbered and colour schematic.

Step 3: Take into account information give under headings preflop and post flop.

How to play poker preflop is a tough subject to cover in detail. There are many factors you need to take into account such as:

• Your position and your opponents position.
• Your opponents likely holdings
• Board texture
• Previous history

A brief explanation of why position is powerful and why we play fewer hands when there are more players left to act (still with a hand):

When playing on a fullring table, you will have to contend with nine players, who each have a chance of picking up a big hand. Therefore, when playing a full ring game, you will play fewer hands. You can read more on this concept at fullring vs. 6max.

The difference in player numbers is also why we play a wide range of hands from the Button, but very few hands from UTG (first position). When opening the Button, we only have two players left to act (unlikely for them to have a strong hand), whereas when playing from UTG in a full ring game, eight other players could potentially pick up a big hand.

For more in-depth details on this see Texas Holdem Strategy and Position is King!

Step 4: Take home some cash

Hopefully, this poker cheat sheet will help you ‘bring home the bacon' as they say, but there is always something more to learn in poker. Keep reading for some more cheat sheets which might be of use to you.

Get Your Miniature (Credit Card Sized) Texas Holdem Starting Hands Cheat Sheet

This cheat sheet only contains the most vital information you need so it can handily fit in your pocket. The legends have also been squeezed onto the hand chart in front of hands we always fold.

To download printable PDF which is scaled to credit card size, use the Facebook unlock button:

Poker Odds Cheat Sheet (for Texas Hold'em)

Get your pot odds cheat sheet below. You can use this to determine the number of outs required to continue based on the pot odds you are being offered. You can also use it to convert between percentages, required outs and ratios for all kinds of situations in poker. The pot odds cheat sheet is explained in more detail below:

Click here to get a high-quality printable pdf version of the Poker Odds Cheat Sheet.

When your opponent bets you will be offered odds based on the size of his bet. For example, if your opponent bets half pot you will be offered odds of 3:1 on a call (call 1 to win 3). Essentially, it is your risk to reward ratio.

Pot odds will tell you whether is it correct for you to call or fold based on what size our opponent bet and how many cards that will improve our hand.

If you are interested in the learning poker math, check out our best poker books recommendation page here for some awesome books on poker math.

How To Use This Pot Odds Cheat Sheet – Facing River Bet Example

1. Work out pot odds

In this hand, our opponent bets $26 into a $41.5 pot making the total pot size $67.5. This gives us odds of 67.5: 26 (67.5 = 41.5+26). Or approximately 2.6:1. You can also see how to convert this into a percentage in our article pot odds.

2. Find 2.6:1 on the card (or as close to it as possible).

We locate 2.6:1 on the chart tells us that 2.6:1 translates to 30.11% pot equity. In other words:

• if we win 30% of the time, we will break even,
• if we win > 30% of the time we will make a profit on average in this situation
• if we win <30% of the time, we will make a loss on average in this situation

3. Determine our actual equity

This is the tough part, unfortunately.

You have to estimate how often you are beaten by your opponent in order to determine if you can profitably call or not. To do this you can use a program such as equilab to plug in hands that you think your opponent may have and the hand that you currently hold. To learn more about estimating what your opponent may be holding see the article poker hand range: the comprehensive beginner guide. From the example above, we plug in some hands we think our opponent may have and see that we have 34% equity:

4. Determine if we can profitably call.

Since our equity is greater than our pot odds, we can profitably call the river bet. If our equity were less than the pot odds being offered, we would have to fold as we cannot c call.

How To Use This Pot Odds Cheat Sheet – Facing Flop Bet Example

Let's take a similar situation (confronted with a bet), except this time we are on the flop with KQs, and we have a flush draw with nine outs. A King and Queen which could be considered outs, but they aren't clean outs. This means even if we hit our hand we still may not win (say for example our opponent has AA).

1. Work out equity percentage:

Since we have nine clean outs, we can simply go to the number 9 on the card and then determine our equity.

This means that we need a minimum pot odds of 1.9:1 or 38% when we have nine outs on the flop with two cards still to come.

3. Compare pot odds to odds given by bettor.

Our equity is 38%, so we need pot odds of less than 38%. The lower the pot odds, the more profitable the call.

Our pot odds are 12.5/33 which is 37%, and hence we just about have the pot odds to call. However, we are also in positon (and will act last with more information) and have two overcards to the board (both a King and Queen will make top pair good kicker). So this is an easy call.

4. Further reading

We need seven outs to continue, and we have nine outs with a flush draw. See calculating outs for more details.

For more information on how to use this poker cheat sheet see poker and pot odds.

This video will also be useful to you:

Poker Hands Cheat Sheet: Best Texas Hold em Hands

In case you aren't familiar with the hand strengths, and hand rankings of poker check out the printout Texas Holdem hands cheat sheet:

(You may also be interested in the rules of texas hold em)

There are a few important things to remember when memorising at the poker hand rankings:

Best Five Cards Win

In poker, it is always the best five cards wins. This means it is not only the pairs that matter if there is no clear winner (nobody has a pair), the decision will go down to high card wins.

Kickers

Kickers decide the winning hand when two opponents have the same pair or three of a kind. For example, if one opponent has AQ (ace-queen) and another has AJ, the opponent with AQ would win on an A7522 board as he has the five card hand of AAQ75 whereas the second opponent has AAJ75.

Split Pots

Split pots occur when opponents have the same hand. For example, imagine one opponent has A4 and the other A3 on AQ752 board. Both opponents would have five card hand of AAQ75. Neither the 4 or 3 would play.

You can get more information about hand rankings on our web page here.

Printable Poker Hands Guide Template

If you are more visually inclined, check out this video on poker hand rankings:

For more on Texas Hold'em strategy, see poker 101.

Make sure you check out the fan favourite posts:

Common poker mistakes & Texas Holdem Poker Tips

Good luck at the poker tables with your new poker cheat sheet!