What a combo is
A combo is one specific two-card hand, such as the ace of spades with the king of spades. A 52-card deck deals 1,326 of them, and poker players group them into 169 starting hands by ranks and by whether the two cards share a suit. Counting how many combos each group holds is the first step in putting a number on a range.
Every pair has 6 combos, every suited hand has 4 and every offsuit hand has 12. A hand like AKs looks as common as AKo on a chart, but there are three times as many AKo combos, so you meet AKo three times as often. Counting combos turns "how likely is it that they hold this?" into a division you can do at the table.
| Kind | Hands | Combos per hand | Combos in all | Share of 1,326 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pairs | 13 | 6 | 78 | 5.88% |
| Suited hands | 78 | 4 | 312 | 23.53% |
| Offsuit hands | 78 | 12 | 936 | 70.59% |
Choose a starting hand
Every cell of the grid links to a page for that hand. Pairs run down the diagonal, suited hands sit above it and offsuit hands below, with the ace row and column first. Each page lists the hand's specific combos, how many remain when you hold a card of each rank, how a paired board changes the count, and where the hand ranks.
- Pairs
- Suited hands
- Offsuit hands
Top-percent ranges
A range is a set of hands, and the pages below size ten of them: the top 5 percent of starting hands up to the top 50 percent, ranked by equity against a random hand. A range always takes whole hands, so its exact share lands a little under the round number, and each page states the figure it reaches.
| Range | Hands | Combos | Exact share | Weakest hand |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Top 5 percent | 11 | 60 | 4.52% | AJs |
| Top 10 percent | 20 | 130 | 9.80% | KJs |
| Top 15 percent | 30 | 196 | 14.78% | A5s |
| Top 20 percent | 39 | 264 | 19.91% | QJo |
| Top 25 percent | 47 | 328 | 24.74% | QTo |
| Top 30 percent | 55 | 386 | 29.11% | J9s |
| Top 35 percent | 64 | 462 | 34.84% | T9s |
| Top 40 percent | 73 | 524 | 39.52% | T8s |
| Top 45 percent | 80 | 592 | 44.65% | K3o |
| Top 50 percent | 90 | 658 | 49.62% | J5s |
Put the counts to work
The hand ranking calculator shows the strength table behind these pages, and the equity calculator takes a hand or a top-percent range and returns the exact odds for any board.
How this was computed
Every count on these pages comes from the 52-card deck itself: all 1,326 two-card hands, sorted into 169 classes, with known cards removed to give blocker counts. Rank and equity come from our table of all 169 by 169 preflop matchups, each counted over all 1,712,304 five-card boards with no sampling.
Source: GeorgeLiPoker's own count of the 52-card deck and its preflop matchup table.