Starting Hand Chart by Position

A reasonable opening range tightens the earlier you act and loosens near the button. This chart uses the Chen Formula — a quick hand-strength heuristic — to set an opening threshold per seat, then lists the loosest hands that clear it.

“% of hands opened” is the share of all 1,326 two-card starting combinations that clear this seat’s threshold — not a claim about how often you’ll actually be dealt one.

Across this table the spread runs from 6.6% of hands in Under the Gun to 51.7% on the Big Blind — 7.8x as many hands, from the same deck, decided by nothing but the order people act in.

Why a heuristic, when the simulation is right there

This chart is built on a formula Bill Chen published as a way to score a hand in your head at the table. One route away, this site ships measured equity for all 169 classes from a Monte Carlo run — so the obvious question is why the chart does not just rank hands by that instead. Ranking them both ways answers it. Over all 169 classes the two orders agree at a Spearman correlation of 0.952 9-handed, which is why Chen is worth anything at all. The interesting part is the 10 hands where they part company, because the disagreement has a direction.

The split is clean: every hand Chen flatters is headed by a 9 or lower, and every hand it dismisses is headed by a ten or better. All of the dismissed ones are suited. Chen penalises a gap steeply and only pays its connector bonus below a queen, so it talks up small joined-up hands and writes off a big card sitting next to a weak one.

Which of the two is wrong is the wrong question, and the dataset says so itself: its figures are simulated against random opponents, to showdown. Neither condition describes a hand you actually play. Nobody reaches the river against 8 random holdings — they reach it against the ones who chose to keep going — and a small suited connector earns its money in the pots it wins after the flop, not in the ones it drags at showdown. So the two lists are the two things a showdown number cannot see, in the two directions you would expect. The chart uses Chen because a chart is for deciding whether to enter a pot, which is the question Chen was built for.

The suited bonus is not flat

Chen adds a flat +2 to a hand’s score for being suited, whatever the two cards are. The measured premium is not flat. Comparing every suited class against its own offsuit twin, being suited is worth an average of 3.9 points of pot share 9-handed, and the premium grows as the cards get further apart — from 3.6 points for a connector up to 4.9 for the widest gap there is.

That is a claim about shape and not about size: Chen’s +2 is a score point and these are percentage points of equity, which are different units and not comparable. The shape is the part worth knowing, and it runs against the instinct — the flush is worth most to the hand that has nothing else going for it. A connector already makes straights, so the suit adds less on top; a wide-gap hand has only ever had the flush.