How to Use Preflop Charts

Downloading a preflop chart takes a minute. Actually using one — so that the right answer arrives before you have finished looking at your cards — takes a bit of method. Here is the whole process: how to read the grid, how to memorise a range by shape instead of by list, how to drill it, and how to adjust it for your game.

1. Read the grid as a picture

Every preflop chart is the same 13×13 grid of the 169 starting-hand types, and it always has the same three zones:

• The diagonal — pairs, from AA in the top-left corner to 22 in the bottom-right.
• Above the diagonal — suited hands, marked with an “s”. AKs is ace-king of the same suit.
• Below the diagonal — offsuit hands, marked with an “o”. AKo is ace-king of different suits.

One number is worth knowing because it changes how a chart looks versus how it plays: a pair is 6 card combinations, a suited hand is 4, an offsuit hand is 12. So the offsuit half of the grid carries three times the weight of the suited half. A chart that looks balanced by area is not balanced by frequency — which is why adding a few offsuit hands moves your percentage far more than adding a few suited ones.

Look at that grid for a few seconds and you will see the shape: a solid block in the top-left corner, a long arm running right along the top two rows (the suited aces and kings), a short arm running down the left column (the offsuit aces), a thin diagonal stripe of suited connectors, and emptiness in the bottom-right. Every opening chart is that same shape — the arms just get longer as you move toward the button.

2. Memorise by shape, not by list

Nobody remembers 169 cells. What people actually remember is where each arm stops. For any seat, you only need five or six facts:

• The weakest pair you open.
• The weakest suited king (suited aces are almost always all of them).
• The weakest suited queen and suited jack.
• The smallest suited connector.
• The weakest offsuit ace and the weakest offsuit broadway.

From the cutoff, for instance, that is: all pairs, all suited aces, suited kings to K7s, suited queens and jacks to Q9s and J9s, connectors and one-gappers down to 54s, offsuit aces to A9o, and offsuit broadways from JTo and QTo up. Seven facts instead of 169 cells — and you can reconstruct the whole grid from them.

Learn the seats in the order they matter: button first (the widest range and the most profitable seat), then the big blind (the most frequent spot), then the cutoff, then the small blind, then the hijack and UTG, which are tight and easy. Each position chart lists its own edges in a table for exactly this purpose.

3. Understand what gold actually means

The gold cells are the ones people get stuck on. A mixed hand is one the strategy plays some of the time and folds the rest — in a solver it might be raised 40% of the time, not because the solver is undecided, but because being unpredictable has value.

You do not need to randomise. Turn the gold into a rule you can follow: raise the mixed hands when the players behind you are tight or passive, fold them when they raise a lot. That single rule captures most of the value of a mixed strategy and is far easier to execute than a coin flip at the table.

4. Drill it, do not re-read it

Reading a chart creates recognition; drilling creates recall. They are not the same thing, and only one of them survives contact with a real table. A drilling routine that works:

1. One seat at a time. Twenty hands from the button, check each answer, then move on. Do not mix six positions on day one.
2. Say the action out loud before you look. Guessing and then checking makes the memory stick; reading the answer first does not.
3. Keep a list of the hands you get wrong. It will be 20 or 30 hands, almost all of them at the edges of the range. That list is your actual study material.
4. Ten minutes daily beats two hours weekly. Spacing is what turns recall into reflex.
5. Then drill the spots after the flop. Preflop is the small part. The hands you open are hands you then have to play.

Two things worth checking rather than believing: the price you are getting on a call, and how a borderline hand really performs against the range you are up against. The poker equity calculator answers both in a few seconds, and the reasoning behind when to raise instead of call is in when to 3-bet.

5. Adjust for rake, stakes and live games

A chart is an average, and your game is not the average. Four adjustments cover almost everything:

• Heavy rake (micro stakes). Rake is taken out of pots you win, so hands with a thin edge lose it entirely. Fold the gold, and open a little tighter from the blinds and early seats, where your edge is smallest.
• Loose, passive tables. More callers means more multiway pots, and multiway pots reward hands that make big hands. Suited hands, connectors and pairs go up in value; offsuit broadways like KJo and QTo go down.
• Live games. Opens are usually 4x or 5x rather than 2.5x, which makes defending much more expensive — against a big raise you should defend roughly half as many hands from the big blind as the chart shows. People also limp, and a limped pot is not a raise-first-in spot.
• Tournaments and short stacks. Below about 40 big blinds these charts stop applying: shoving and folding replace a lot of the middle of the range, and antes make stealing cheaper. Use dedicated short-stack ranges instead.

Frequently asked questions

Preflop charts → How to use preflop charts