Texas Hold’em Cheat Sheet — Free Printable PDF & Interactive Guide

Grab the free printable PDF — it fits A4, Letter, or a pocket-size card. Toss it in your bag and skip the memorizing. Pick a paper size, press the button, then choose “Save as PDF” in the print dialog. The whole Texas Hold’em cheat sheet lands on one page: rankings, starting hands, and the pot odds table. No email gate, no signup, and no watermark stamped across your cheat sheet.

Every decision in Hold Em starts here. If you cannot name the winner instantly, nothing else on this cheat sheet helps you. The chart below is the core of the whole cheat sheet: all ten hands from strongest to weakest, with a real example, what each one beats, and how often it actually turns up by the river.

A royal flush sits at the top: ace through ten in a single suit, and nothing beats it. A straight flush is any other five in a row sharing a suit. Four of a kind takes all four cards of one rank. A full house pairs three of a kind with a pair, and it beats a flush — five cards of one suit — which in turn beats a straight, five in sequence with mixed suits. Three of a kind comes next, then two pair, then a single pair, which wins far more pots than beginners expect. High card is last: no pair, no straight, no flush, so the highest card decides it. Those ten rows are the part of the cheat sheet worth memorising before anything else.

Read this cheat sheet top to bottom, strongest first. The number in the gold badge is the hand’s rank, so a lower number always beats a higher one — rank four beats rank five no matter how pretty the cards look. The percentage on the right is how often you end up holding that hand by the river, using the best five cards out of seven, which is the number that matters in Texas Hold’em. Those figures run lower than the five-card-draw odds most sites publish, because two extra board cards change the math. Suits never break a tie here; no suit outranks another. Print the cheat sheet and that column is the one you will check most.

Knowing the order is not the same as knowing what it is worth, which is the gap this cheat sheet is built to close. A flush sounds huge until you notice it arrives around three percent of the time — often enough that a second flush at the table is a real risk. One pair, meanwhile, wins a surprising number of pots because most hands never improve past it. The practical takeaway of this cheat sheet: value your hand against what your opponent can hold, not against the chart in isolation. Top pair is strong heads-up on a dry board and close to worthless in a four-way pot after a big raise.

Most of the money new players lose is lost before the flop, on hands that could never win. This half of the Texas Hold’em cheat sheet covers all 169 starting combinations. Pairs run down the diagonal, suited hands sit above it, offsuit hands below. Hover or tap any cell to see the verdict.

Green cells are premium — the top tier of this cheat sheet. Big pairs from sevens up, the strong suited broadways — ace-king, ace-queen, ace-jack, ace-ten, king-queen, king-jack and queen-jack — plus ace-king and ace-queen offsuit. Open these from any seat, including under the gun, and re-raise with them when someone opens ahead of you. They hold value out of position because they either make top pair with the best kicker or flop a strong draw. Only about one hand in nine lands in this group, so folding often before the flop is normal rather than passive.

Amber cells are conditional. Small pairs, the suited aces, suited connectors such as nine-eight and seven-six, and the offsuit broadways all play well when you get in cheaply with position. The cheat sheet marks them amber for a reason: open them when the pot is still unopened and you sit in middle or late seat. Fold them to a raise from an early position: a small pair that wins mainly by flopping a set needs a cheap entry and deep stacks to be worth it, and offsuit broadways are the hands most often dominated by the exact range that raised. Treat the amber tier of the cheat sheet as position-dependent, never automatic.

Blank cells go in the muck preflop, and that is most of the grid. Offsuit hands with a gap, weak aces like ace-six offsuit, and anything shaped like king-four or queen-three are the hands that make expensive second-best pairs. The trap is the ace: hitting it gives you top pair with a kicker that loses to every better ace still in the pot. If you take one rule from this cheat sheet, take this one — folding these hands is not tight play, it is the cheapest improvement available to a new player.

A hand of Texas Holdem runs through the same six stages every time, and the cheat sheet follows that order. Once the sequence is automatic you stop worrying about what happens next and start thinking about what your opponent is representing, which is where the rest of this cheat sheet earns its keep.

Position is the one edge no cheat sheet can hand you — you have to use it. Acting last means you see what everyone else does before you commit a chip. The map below shows an eight-handed table with the preflop action order marked on every seat.

Under the gun acts first and needs the tightest range, because seven players can still wake up with a hand behind it. The hijack and cutoff open wider. The button acts last on every street after the flop and is the most profitable seat at the table. The blinds are the exception: they act late preflop but first on every later street, which is why they lose money over time even when played well. Pair this seat map with the starting-hand grid above and the cheat sheet gives you a full preflop plan: widen your opening range toward the button, tighten it from the blinds.

Pot odds turn a gut call into arithmetic, and this is the part of the cheat sheet you will reach for most often. The question is always the same: how often do I need to win for this call to break even? Divide the amount you must call by the size of the pot after you call, and you have the answer.

First example: the pot holds $60 and you face a $20 call. The final pot would be $80, so your call is a quarter of it and you need to win 25% of the time. A flush draw on the flop gets there roughly 36% of the time by the river, so calling is clearly correct.

Second example: the pot holds $100 and your opponent shoves another $100. You must call $100 into a final pot of $300, which means you need 33%. A gutshot straight draw is about 16% — a clear fold, even though the hand feels close in the moment. Keep the cheat sheet open and run the number before you decide, not after.

Six habits cost beginners more than every bad beat combined. None of them need a Texas Hold’em cheat sheet to fix — they need one decision made differently, over and over, until it sticks.

Go deeper on any part of this Texas Hold’em cheat sheet: the full poker hand rankings chart with tiebreaker rules, the complete starting hands guide, a walkthrough of the betting rounds and bet sizing, and the printable pack if the PDF is all you came for. The poker hand rankings chart and the printable pack are live now; the other two are being written.