Shoving Hands Poker

Table Of Contents

Are you struggling to figure out what starting hands to play and how poker positions change the way you play preflop? You are not alone.

What does shoving mean in poker? To shove means to go all-in, putting all of your chips in the pot. A shove is also known as a jam or push. When To Shove In Poker (Going All In) There’s not a much more exhilarating feeling in Texas Holdem than putting all your chips in the middle, also known as “shoving all in”, or just “shoving”. Improve your poker game while playing up to 500 hands an hour against the smartest artificially intelligent poker players ever designed. Pick your hands, your position, and the style of your opponents. Poker training will never be the same.

This article isn't a poker strategy crash course. Instead of focusing on generic winning poker tips and bankroll management advice like many other training poker sites do, it gives you something different.

It's a collection of advanced poker charts that improves your poker game by showing you how to play preflop. It gives you a clear overview of the starting hands range you should consider through some handy poker hands chart images, PDFs, and Excel files.

Continue reading to learn:

• And lots more

In other words, if you are looking for an in-depth game strategy guide to learn what is the best way to play poker preflop, you'll love this collection of poker range charts.

Why a Page about Poker Ranges?

All poker players have been there. Short-stacked. Bleeding chips with every orbit while staring at junk hand after junk hand. Feeling their chances of winning the tournament dwindle ever further while their stack continues to shrink.

Finally, they get a halfway decent hand. Nobody has entered the pot.

Is it time to shove?

There's an easy way to find out. Enter poker range charts. These handy tools allow players to see which poker hand ranges to play in preflop scenarios where the pot is unopened and a player plans to shove or fold.

Playing the proper ranges according to preflop charts make it so your play can't be exploited, so memorizing these is the key to short-stacked play.

Read on to learn more and find the accompanied printable poker hand ranges chart as a tool you can study to improve your performance when short-stacked.

What are poker ranges?

For those unfamiliar a poker hand range is simply a set of poker hands that may be held by a player. We try to estimate our opponents' ranges because guessing exact hole cards is a fruitless, nearly impossible exercise in most cases.

For example, if the tightest player you've ever seen reraises you preflop in hold'em, you may estimate their range to be aces and kings only.

Shoving Hands Poker Rules

On the other hand, if a player who hasn't folded one hand in an hour calls your raise, you may estimate their range to include any two cards in the deck. Of course, most hand ranges will be somewhere in between.

How Do You Calculate Poker Ranges?

Analyzing ranges can be a tricky proposition, and only by learning game theory and playing thousands of hands can a poker player get better at it.

Including some proper proper preflop strategy in your poker training will help you understand what poker hand ranges they'll play.

The more time you spend playing and watching opponents' hands at showdown, the more clues you'll get about their strategy. That will enable you to get more precise estimates of their ranges when playing future hands.

This video from poker pro Jonathan Little explores the concept in a little more depth and tries to answer the question 'how do I think in terms of hand ranges?'

How to Use Preflop Range Charts

Every position at the poker table has a certain range of starting hands that can be profitably shoved at a given stack depth.

Generally, these stack depths are at 20 big blinds or less.

Preflop range charts outline the hands that constitute a winning shoving range.

A player who knows these charts can shove with a positive expected value (+EV) no matter what cards are held by the opponents remaining to act.

Here on PokerNews you find free preflop poker charts for five different stack depths at both six-max tables and nine-handed tables.

Here's how to use them:

1. Figure out how many big blinds you have in your stack.
2. Go to the corresponding chart. If you have a stack that doesn't match one exactly, pick the closest one.
3. Go to the column that corresponds to your seat.
4. Scroll down until you get to the row that corresponds to your hole cards — the chart starts with pairs at the top, then ace-high hands, then king-high and so on.
5. You can shove all of the hands listed there, as well as any hands to the left that were shoved in an earlier seat.

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Poker Ranges Charts

Here are 10 essential poker charts to help your preflop poker game.

They're broken into two categories: full-ring ranges and six-max ranges. Each category features shoving hands for five different stack sizes, raised in increments of three big blinds.

As you'll often have stacks in between these sizes, it may take a small amount of guesswork and intuition to expand or tighten the ranges a bit and get the appropriate strategy.

1. Full Ring Ranges Poker Charts

2. Six-Max Ranges Poker Charts

Use the Printable Poker Charts on Excel!

Want to bring all the poker charts with you? Make a copy of this shared Excel file and download the full collection of our advanced poker charts.

To create your own copy of all the poker charts on this article:

• Click on 'File'
• Then click on 'Create a Copy'
• Done! You can now use all these poker ranges charts to improve your win rate!

These are optimal poker ranges for winning chips if your opponents are calling correctly. Each poker chart should be adjusted depending on reads you can gather when you play cash games or tournament poker.

• If your opponents are calling too wide, shove a little tighter so you're more likely to have the best of it.
• If your opponents aren't calling wide enough, widen your range of hands and shove a few extra hands because you are likely to be able to steal their blinds.

Considerations should also be made for the state of the poker tournament, i.e. proximity to the money bubble, a pay jump, or a final table.

These can heavily influence calling ranges and proper shoving strategy, changing the way you should play if you are using these poker charts to play winning poker.

Some bits of the poker ranges charts may look a bit weird, specifically in regard to suited ace-high hands.

This is because some of the small suited aces perform slightly better against calling ranges than middle aces. At certain stack depths and positions, it's better to shove ace-five suited than ace-seven suited, for example.

How to memorize poker ranges

Given that there are 169 different hands in Texas hold'em poker, differently sized tables, and slightly different shoving ranges for every stack depth, it's unreasonable to think you'll be able to perfectly memorize an exactly correct shoving strategy.

Furthermore, doing so would probably be counter-productive, as you're better off dedicating your brainpower and efforts elsewhere.

Getting a rough idea of correct preflop poker ranges to shove will allow you to play well with a short stack while still improving your game in other aspects with your remaining study time.

There's no handy acronym like 'Roy G. Biv' (rainbow colors) or 'PEMDAS' (order of mathematical operations) to help you remember the shoving strategy offered in all the preflop range charts on this page.

And despite what other poker guides and poker training sites say, the purpose of poker charts like these ones is not to have you memorise everything. That's not how you will improve your win rate.

The best way to learn is to make your shoves and then continually check afterward whether it was correct. Eventually, the raising ranges will start to take shape in your memory.

Here are a few poker tips to keep in mind:

• Pairs are great to jam with. If you're under 10 big blinds, you can almost jam with any pair from any position. With such a small stack, waiting for top pairs is not a good idea.
• If your cards are unpaired, it's obviously preferable to have high suited cards.
• Small suited hands lose a lot of value in preflop shoving situations compared to their deep-stacked playability. Many hands wind up unimproved by the river, so the higher cards will win in these spots.
• Still, hands with a high card and low card (something like king-five offsuit) might be favored against something like ten-nine suited in a head-to-head clash, but the latter performs better against opponents' calling hands, so it's preferable to shove with.

• The biggest jumps in shoving range will come the closer you get to the big blind — i.e., the difference between shoving in the first two seats is far less than the difference in shoving between the button and small blind.

  This is because one extra fold represents a much bigger portion of the remaining opponents, meaning the likelihood of running into a big hand has decreased more significantly. So, get comfortable shoving very wide in the small blind and still quite wide from the button and cutoff.

Most Common Preflop Ranges

_{All percentile ranges you see below are taken from pokerhandrange.com}

Top 7%

If you run into a very tight opponent, expect here or she to be opening something like the top 7% of hands from early or even middle position. Only the tightest ranges will play this way.

Shoving Hands Poker Card Game

What does that look like? About as strong as you'd expect:

• 88
• ATs , AQo
• KJs

Top 15%

Opening the top 15% of hands is still quite tight, but allows a bit more play down to the strong offsuit Broadways, most of the suited aces, and all of the suited Broadways.

It's probably close to a 'typical' opening range for a standard live player:

• 66
• A5s , ATo
• K9s , KJo
• Q9s , JTs

Top 35%

If you run into a player who is aggressively trying to steal seemingly every time it's folded to them in late position, their range might be in the top 35% or so of hands, or potentially even wider.

That's going to include a great many suited combos with even just one Broadway, as well as some fairly weak offsuit holdings down to jack-nine:

• 33
• A2s , A5o
• K2s , K8o
• Q4s , Q9o
• J7s , J9o
• T7s
• 97s
• 87s

Top 60%

Only the absolute loosest, most aggressive opposition will play a range this wide, but it certainly does happen.

The top 60% is usually reserved for short-stacked players shoving from the button and small blind, so if you wonder what that range might look like, here it is:

• 22
• Ax
• K2s , K3o
• Q2s , Q5o
• J2s , J7o
• T2s , T7o
• 94s , 97o
• 84s
• 74s
• 64s
• 54s

Shoving Hands Poker Game

Additional Readings

Now that you have our starting hands range and you have all the information you need on your Excel printable file, it's time to continue this poker lab experiment with more poker guides.

If you are really committed to playing better poker, here's a list that will help you reach your goals.

• Essential Poker Tips: a complete collection of the most effective poker tips we know. While some might be more beginner-oriented, other tidbits might help also more seasoned players.
• Poker Equity: one of the most popular poker articles ever published in our advanced poker strategy section. This is one of those must-read poker guides you need to go through at least once in your (poker) life.
• Poker Positions: having our printable poker range charts in PDF is not enough to become a winning poker player. You need a lot more — including this guide to poker positions. Learn how every position named at the table and learn how to use everything to your advantage when you fire up your poker software.
• The Best Online Poker Sites: the world-famous and award-winnings PokerNews rankings. If you ever wanted to play a hand of online poker, this is the perfect starting point for you.
• Mobile Poker Sites: some poker software a great on desktop, but how about their mobile apps? Read this one to find out what brands offer the top mobile products in the industry.
• Free Poker Sites: Not all online games cost money. All the sites on this list offer great poker games that will cost you nada.
• Poker Freerolls: want to win real money prizes but don't want to risk your own? play a freeroll! This page gives you access to all the top free poker tournaments happening right now.

_{Additional Note:}

_{The shoving ranges in this article, while available in many forms on different poker resources, were specifically taken from SnapShove. Check out SnapShove for more information about preflop shoving and calling strategy.}

One situation every tournament player finds themselves in often is the decision to shove or not with a marginal hand when down to a stack of between five and eight Ms.

A lot of these situations are standard. If opening from the button with an M of 5, when there are antes and fairly tight players in the blinds, you’re pretty much shoving anything. If under the gun with an M of 7 against a table with a couple of players who have limp/folded recently, you’re saving your chips with virtually anything but premium hands.

However, all too often we find ourselves in marginal situations. When opening with a shortish stack from mid position, it’s not clear whether one should be shoving or folding with hands like A6o or JTo. Certainly, with antes out there and a stack with anything under an M of 5, I think a shove is warranted, but there are lots of contributing factors. I want to have a closer look at these marginal situations.

First, let’s consider these other factors:

1. Table dynamic. Is the table passive? Are you getting walks in the blinds? Are people limp/folding? If the answer is yes to any of these, you might consider being less risky with your open shoves.
2. Position. If you have one player behind you, the chances that he has Kings or Aces is about 1%. With five players behind, it’s about 5%. The more players behind, the more likely you are to get called, regardless of player type.
3. Fold equity. Steal success is also down to how tight the players are behind you. Players who are folding everything but Aces and Kings should be shoved on with anything – the maths is irresistible here. However, note that this factor has two dimensions – the looser a player is, the more equity your hand will have against it when called.
4. Hand value. Last but not least, we have your actual hand. Where fold equity is usually the reason that stealing is profitable, you should expect to be looked up by opponents too. How your hand fares in this situation can be a major contributor to equity in your hand.

It’s this final factor that I want to pay particular attention to here.

In the table below, I’ve taken a motley collection of hands which I find can be marginal in those not-quite-short-stacked-yet situations. These are times when continuing to fold will mean having to shove a whole bunch of rubbish in a couple of rounds, but shoving just yet doesn’t seem like a money-making play given your opposition, your position and your holding.

I’ve pitted each of these hands against a calling/shoving range from the opponent of top 5%, 10%, 15% and so on up to top 50% hands. Note that the resulting equities are just as valid if you find yourself looking to call a shove with one of these hands (presumably with much shorter effective stacks) or whether you are doing the shoving yourself and looking to steal or have some show down value.

I’ve put Q7o in there too just to show what the so-called “middle of the range” hand looks like in comparison. Note that Pokerstove (my resource for these equity figures) actually puts Q7o at slightly above the median hand (it says Q7o is around top 48% – reckoning T7o is the median hand).

I’ve colour shaded the equities to make it more obvious how steep the rise in equity is for certain hands as compared with others. Note also the right most two columns. The “percentile” column is where Pokerstove places that hand in ranking. So J8s is in the top 24% of hands according to Pokerstove. The “P(next 5)” column is the probability that you will NOT get a hand in a higher percentile in the next five hands (if you fold of course).

Shoving Hands Poker Games

Although it’s very rare these days that anyone will shove with only 5%, it’s certainly possible due to ICM that people will having a calling range that narrow. It’s interesting that all our marginal hands perform quite badly against such a range (all of them, including the low pocket pairs, are between 3/1 and 2/1 shots). However, if your opponent is folding 95% of their range, it’s presumably profitable to be shoving anything if there are antes and you are shortish stacked.

More interesting is the way the equities increase as opponents become looser and looser. Low pocket pairs, which start off being roughly as much of a dog as the suited and connected type hands such as JTo, J8s and 97s steal a march on them as opponent ranges get to around the 15-20% mark. At that point, the pairs are a full 10% better equity wise that the drawing hands. Yet as we expand the opponent’s range to 40-50%, the margin closes again to within a few percent.

The broad reason for this is domination. Up to the 5% part of an opponent’s range, there is a healthy portion of high pocket pairs – holdings that dominate hands like 44 as much as they do 97s. However, expand the range to 15-20% and the hands that get added are the suited and unsuited Broadways, along with a few suited Aces. These are holding which hands like 44 are not dominated by, but hands like J8s and 97s are.

Expand the range a bit further – to 40% or so – and the hands that get added are those which the likes of JTo and J8s can do better against; hands that they themselves dominate (e.g T8s). By comparison hands such as 22, much as they will always have around 45-55% equity against unpaired hands, are not getting any new “bump” in equity. They’ll be around 50/50 against 75o, just like they will against AJo.

I’m not sure one should start tinkering with shoving ranges solely depending on an opponent’s likelihood of calling. It’s also still contingent on how many players you have to beat and your stack size. Nevertheless, the table does show that certain types of hand are better against generally cally players and generally foldy players.

Against cally players weak Aces and low pocket pairs do reasonably well. Against foldy players, the hope is that they fold(!); hence we can add marginal hands such as the J8s and 97s to the range in the knowledge that our equity if called is not terribly worse than if we had shoved with a more genuine hand such as A6o or 44. The caveat here is that against generally foldy players, you need a whole bunch of them behind you (say, more than three) before you opt not to shove with ANY of these hands (excepting perhaps Q7o).

The other point of interest is the final two columns. They assess the likelihood that if you folded this hand now, you would be dealt a better hand in the next five. Note that the percentiles I’ve used are from Pokerstove’s ranking which is derived by pitting every hand against every other hand. 22 thus performs relatively badly (Pokerstove says it’s only a top 60% hand) because it doesn’t do well against 54o for example. However, it’s worth noting regardless of how the hands are ranked, that if you have a top 20% hand, the chances of you being dealt a better hand in the next five is only 33%.

The scope of this article is too narrow to conclude shoving and calling ranges based on stack sizes and number of opponents behind (I would recommend Kill Everyone and No Limit Hold Em Theory and Practice for that). However, it’s worth noting that these marginal hands – despite being quite different in other poker terms (how they flop, what depth of stack is best for playing with them) – when it comes to the shove or fold part of a tournament, they all fare quite similarly, regardless of opponent shove/calling ranges.

This article first appeared in Bluff Europe magazine.