Free Printable Texas Hold'em Cheat Sheet (PDF): Winning Hands, Starting Hands & Pot Odds

Choose A4, Letter or pocket and download the ready-made PDF directly. The separate print button opens your browser’s print dialog if you prefer printing or saving a fresh copy there. Both versions use the site’s shared hand and odds data. A4 and Letter contain the full reference on one page; the pocket version uses two cards for rankings and starting hands.

Four blocks, chosen because they are the four things players actually forget in the middle of a session, and few enough that the free printable version fits on one side of A4 or Letter. Everything else — the explanations, the examples, the history — stays on the website, where you have room to read it.

All ten hands from royal flush down to high card, each with an example and how often it turns up by the river. This is the block people reach for first, so it sits at the top of the page where your eye lands. A printable poker hands chart on its own is worth the paper: most mistakes at a beginner table are not strategy errors, they are someone misreading which hand won. For tiebreakers and examples, see the full poker hand rankings chart. Check a specific showdown or split pot with the Who Wins poker hand calculator.

The full 13 × 13 matrix of every possible Hold Em starting hand, shaded into three tiers: opening candidates, conditional hands, and default folds. Suited hands sit above the diagonal, offsuit hands below it, and pairs run down the middle. Shading rather than colour-coding by hue is deliberate — see the printing notes further down.

For the full chart and explanations, read our Texas Holdem starting hands guide.

A single strip showing the streets in order — deal, preflop, flop, turn, river, showdown — plus the seat order from under the gun round to the big blind. It takes one line on the sheet and settles the two questions new players ask most: what happens next, and when is it my turn.

What a strip cannot show is why the order changes after the flop: before it, action starts left of the big blind; from the flop on, it starts with the first active player left of the button. Our guide to how the betting rounds work in Texas Hold’em follows one full hand through all four rounds.

The first table shows the break-even equity for common bet sizes. The second shows draw-completion chances from flop to river (two cards) and turn to river (one card). From the flop, the next-card chance is outs ÷ 47; a nine-out flush draw is 19.1% to hit the turn. Use two-card odds only when the call guarantees both cards with no further betting. Completing a draw can still leave you with a losing hand, so these percentages are not your showdown equity. To price a specific call, use the pot odds calculator.

The three options are not one file scaled up and down. Each is laid out for its own sheet, so nothing is cut off and nothing shrinks below readable size.

The US and Canadian default. Letter is slightly wider and about 18 mm shorter than A4, which the layout absorbs by letting the tables breathe sideways instead of running longer. Same content, same single page.

The default nearly everywhere outside North America, and the size the cheat sheet was designed around. Every block fits at a comfortable reading size with room left at the foot of the page, so a stray printer margin cannot push anything onto a second sheet.

A cut-down version on 4 × 6 inch card stock, split across two cards: hand rankings on one, the starting hands grid on the other. The pot odds tables are dropped deliberately — at this size they would be unreadable, and a card you have to squint at is worse than no card at all. Print both, or run one sheet double-sided, then trim the edges. It fits a bag, a chip tray, or the sleeve of a deck box.

Download PDF gives you the selected file immediately. If you prefer your browser’s print settings, choose Print or save in browser instead. You can send that version straight to a printer or choose Save as PDF. The following instructions apply to that separate print button.

In the dialog, open the Destination dropdown at the top and choose “Save as PDF” instead of your printer. Leave Scale on Default and Margins on Default — the cheat sheet already sets its own. Then press Save.

Safari puts the option in the bottom-left corner: click the PDF dropdown and pick “Save as PDF”. If the preview looks washed out, check that “Print backgrounds” is on, otherwise the tier shading in the starting hands grid comes out blank.

On iOS, tap Share then Print, then pinch outward on the preview to turn it into a PDF you can save to Files. On Android, tap the browser menu, choose Print, and set the destination to “Save as PDF”. Either way the layout is identical to the desktop one — the cheat sheet is sized for paper, not for your screen.

A cheat sheet you cannot read under a dim table lamp is decoration. Four things decide whether you keep the cheat sheet or reprint it.

Black and white is fine. The three starting-hand tiers are separated by lightness, not only by hue, so a mono laser printer still shows three clearly different shades. Many printable poker cheat sheet PDFs use red, amber and green at similar brightness, which collapses into one grey mush the moment you print without colour.

Leave backgrounds on. Most browsers strip background colours when printing, to save ink. The tier shading is a background, so turning that setting off erases the whole point of the grid. It usually sits under “More settings” as “Background graphics”.

Card stock beats copy paper. Anything from 160 gsm up survives being shoved in a bag. For the pocket version this matters more than the printer does — a thin sheet folds in half the first time you sit down.

Laminate the pocket card. A cheap laminating pouch, or even clear tape on both sides, makes it spill-proof and stops the ink lifting where your thumb rests. It is the one upgrade worth the five minutes.

The printable poker cheat sheet is the short version. Each block has a full page behind it: our Texas Holdem guide adds positions, pot odds and the common beginner mistakes; the poker hand rankings chart explains all ten hands and how ties are broken; the starting hands chart shows which two-card hands to play from which seat; and the betting rounds walkthrough follows one hand from the blinds to the showdown. If you want the mistake-by-mistake version, our poker blog ranks the five beginner mistakes that cost the most chips, starting with playing too many hands.