Poker Preflop Charts: Why 1,326 Combinations Become 169 Hands

Two hole cards from a 52-card deck form 1,326 distinct combinations, which collapse into 169 strategically different starting hand types. The difference between those two numbers is the whole reason a preflop chart fits on one page.

Why combinations collapse

Suits are interchangeable before the flop. A pair of aces in spades and hearts plays the same as a pair of aces in clubs and diamonds, so all of those combinations share one line in a range chart. What remains is the rank shape and whether the two cards share a suit. Pocket pairs form one group, non-pairs split into suited and offsuit, and that is the entire grid.

Use this when a chart shows a single cell for “AKs”: it stands for every suited ace-king combination, not one specific pair of cards. Reading the cell as one exact holding will make you underestimate how often that shape is dealt, and will make a range look narrower than it is.

Reading the three groups

Pocket pairs are the smallest group and the easiest to recognise. Suited non-pairs and offsuit non-pairs are the same size, because for any two different ranks the suited versions are counted separately from the offsuit ones. The split matters more than the count: a suited hand can make a Flush, which is a ranked hand type, while the offsuit version cannot. That extra route to a strong hand is why charts treat the two as different holdings even before the flop is dealt.

When you are choosing a range for a seat, read the groups in that light. A pocket pair arrives made; a suited connector arrives with two ways to improve, one by rank sequence and one by suit; an offsuit connector has only the sequence. The grid does not rank those holdings for you, but it does tell you which cards can still appear on later streets.

What the 169 grid does not tell you

The grid is a list of types, not a list of how often each one is dealt. A pocket pair type stands for fewer actual card combinations than an offsuit non-pair type, so seeing “169” does not mean every cell is equally likely. It also says nothing about which types are worth opening from a given seat. That decision depends on position, on the players still to act behind you, and on the chips already in the pot.

The preflop charts layer those decisions onto the grid; this page only explains why the grid has 169 cells. Keeping the two apart matters when a chart marks a hand as a fold: that is a judgement about the seat and the field, not a statement that the type is missing from the deck.

Using it with a calculator

When you check a specific matchup, you are back in combination space. The two cards you hold remove cards from the deck and change the remaining counts, so a type that looked broad on the grid may be narrow in your actual hand. A poker odds calculator works at that level and needs the exact cards.

Use the 169 grid to name and group holdings, and use combination-level tools when you need a number for one exact hand. Switching between the two levels mid-calculation is the usual source of a range that looks right on paper but disagrees with the cards on the table.