This post will continue on with the discussion yesterday about good hand rankings and we will talk about determining good razz poker starting hands. This is actually an important topic to learn because there are some guidelines that players should use to determine what types of starting hands are good and which ones are fair. I will go through each of the four different classifications of each hand and a few examples of what would be good to continue playing on. Note that the starting hand is dealt after each player as paid the ante bet. Two cards will be facing down so only you can see them and one card will be facing up so everyone else can see it, known as the door card.

Excellent starting hands are those which contain the wheel card numbers or numbers that make up the most powerful hand in razz poker. These would be the cards such as A-2-3-4-5. You want all three of these cards to contain one of these numbers but you do not want pairs of these numbers as I explained yesterday.

Good hands are the same as excellent varieties of cards, except the highest card would be a 6 and two others would be lower. Fair hands are the same as good or excellent starting hands except the highest cards would be 7 or 8. Having a 7 high would be much more favorable to have instead.

Finally, the poor hands are those which have a high card of 9 or higher. The general razz strategy is to fold on any poor starting hands such as 7-8-9 or something like that. In many cases, A-2-9 would be considered a poor starting hand even though the A-2 part would be excellent on it’s own. The choice to call the bring-in with this hand depends on how aggressive the other players are and whether the ace or nine is showing to everyone else. If the ace is showing, you can use a bluffing strategy but I will write about that another day.