Starting Hands
Which hands are better than which. NLHE fits on a 13x13 grid; PLO4 has 16,432 hand classes, so we ranked all of them and grouped them into the categories players actually think in.
Where these numbers come from, and how precise they are
Rankings are Monte Carlo equity against random opponents: 1 opponent for the heads-up ladder, 2 for 3-handed, 5 for 6-max. Each of the ladder's 20,410 suit-pattern rows gets its own seeded run in a Rust evaluator; the exact trial count behind the ladder you're looking at is in the tooltip next to it. (PLO4 has 16,432 strategically distinct hands - the ladder keys by raw suit layout before full isomorphism reduction, so a few identical hands appear as separate rows. Rows inside the margin of error are the same hand.) Solver open ranges are read straight from our 6-max 100bb MonkerSolver solve - deterministic, no sampling noise.
Monte Carlo means hands separated by less than the margin of error are a statistical tie, and their order can flip between builds. So we reran the marquee AA double-suited hands at 100 million trials each (95% CI about ±0.009 points) to settle the order for good:
| Hand (double-suited) | Equity vs 1 random |
|---|---|
| AATT | 71.53% |
| AAJJ | 71.19% |
| AAQQ | 70.91% |
| AA55 | 70.80% |
| AA99 | 70.73% |
| AAKK | 70.67% |
| AAJT | 70.60% |
| AA88 | 70.54% |
Three things worth taking from that table. AATT beats AAKK because tens do more work than kings: a ten sits in five straights, a king in two, and both of the king's straights contain a ten anyway - so the tens block more of what beats aces, and they cover the middle boards where bare aces need the most help (on nine-high-or-lower runouts our sims give AATT 59.6% to AAKK's 58.6%). AA55 outranks AA99 because an ace and a five make the wheel, while AA99 can never make a straight at all - no straight contains both an ace and a nine, and Omaha makes you play exactly two cards. And the eight hands in that table span barely one point of equity, while dropping any of them from double-suited to rainbow costs five or six - suits move these hands far more than the side pair does.
The 31 hand categories are the same taxonomy used across SolvePLO - the solver's preflop study, the hand history Leaks tab, and this page all speak the same vocabulary.