Advantage Play & Game Integrity
Poker hole cards rankings
A shorthand ranking of a player’s two-card starting hand in poker, ordered by its preflop strength.
Key points
- Hole card rankings evaluate the two hidden cards before community cards appear, not the final five-card hand 1.
- Rankings vary by game and author; no single universal standard exists 12.
Where this term is used
Not the same as
- Community cards in poker — shared face-up cards used by all players, whereas hole card rankings concern only the player's private starting hand
Related terms
Advantage play
Hole card poker
A variant where players use only their own two hole cards to form a hand.
Advantage play
Hole carding 3 card poker
An advantage-play technique that exploits exposed hole cards in three-card poker.
Advantage play
Poker bot
Automated software that plays poker, sometimes using hole card rankings in its strategy.
Advantage play
Poker bot AI
Artificial intelligence systems that apply hole card rankings and other heuristics to play poker.
Advantage play
Collusion poker
Players secretly sharing hole card information to gain an unfair advantage.
Advantage play
Shuffle tracking
A player watches where certain cards or groups of cards go during a shuffle
Sources
- Texas hold 'em starting hands en.wikipedia.org Defines starting-hand rankings and gives the Chen Formula example.
- Texas hold 'em en.wikipedia.org Covers Texas hold 'em rules and the role of hole cards in community-card games.
Sources are drawn from regulators, universities and published research, and each one is labelled with what it actually is — a preprint is not called a paper. Bookmaker and affiliate pages are never cited here, because a page that sells betting is not a neutral authority on it.