Preflop Poker Charts: How to Read Them and Which Ones Are Real

What a preflop chart is

A preflop chart maps every starting hand to an action — raise, call, or fold — for one specific situation. Change the situation and you change the chart: the seat you are sitting in, the seat that acted before you, how deep the stacks are and how big the raise was all belong to the chart, not to the hand.

That is the single most common way charts get misused. A chart is an answer to one question. Applying it to a different question is not a shortcut, it is a different answer.

How to read a 13x13 hand grid

Almost every chart you will see is the same 13-by-13 square, because that is how many distinct starting hands there are once suits that play identically are collapsed together: 169 hand classes.

The diagonal

Pocket pairs, AA down to 22. Each one can be dealt 6 ways, so a pair is 6 of the deck's 1,326 possible starting combinations.

Above the diagonal

Suited hands, written with an s — AKs. Four ways to be dealt, one per suit.

Below the diagonal

Offsuit hands, written with an o — AKo. Twelve ways to be dealt, which is why offsuit hands dominate the raw combination count and why a chart that looks mostly empty can still cover a lot of hands.

A part-filled cell

A mixed strategy: the hand takes that action some of the time. It is not indecision on the chart's part — it is the answer.

Why position changes everything on the chart

The same two cards are a raise in one seat and a fold in another, and no amount of studying the hand will tell you which — the seat is the variable. StackedPoker's explainer on position covers why acting later is worth more, and the position trainer drills the seats themselves.

The charts StackedPoker publishes

There are 38, and every one was read out of a numbered figure in Michael Acevedo's Modern Poker Theory (D&B Poker, 2019) and then checked against the aggregate percentage the book prints beneath that same figure.

First-in raising, 32 charts

8 positions at 15bb, 25bb, 40bb, 60bb effective, for 9-handed tournament play with an ante. Chapter 7, Hand Ranges 96 to 139.

Big blind defence, 5 charts

Fold, call and 3-bet frequencies for the big blind facing a single raise from each earlier seat, 6-max cash at 100bb. Chapter 5, Hand Ranges 76 to 84.

Button versus cutoff, 1 chart

The button's complete response to a cutoff open, 6-max cash at 100bb. Chapter 5, Hand Range 66.

What is deliberately missing

There is no chart here for 6-max cash opening ranges, for facing a 3-bet, or for most defending seats. Not because they do not matter — they are among the most asked-for charts in poker — but because no published figure has been extracted for them, and a chart assembled from a general description would look exactly as authoritative as one that was measured.

Where StackedPoker teaches those spots, it teaches them as lessons with the reasoning shown, and says on the page that the range is a teaching construction rather than a solver output. A chart with a citation and a chart without one are different objects, and this site does not present them as the same.

Practising a chart instead of memorising it

Reading a chart teaches you the chart. Building it from memory, hand by hand, and being told which cells you got wrong is what teaches you the shape — and the shape is what survives into a spot no chart covers.

The range trainer does exactly that, and needs nothing but a free account. If you would rather start from a hand you actually played, the hand analyzer takes one and works out the maths on it with no account at all.

Key takeaway

A preflop chart is worth exactly as much as your knowledge of which question it answers. Check the seat, the stack depth and the raise size before you trust a cell — and prefer a chart that tells you where it came from.