Reading the Preflop Hand Matrix: How to Make Sense of a Range Chart

The first time you open a serious poker study tool, you get about five seconds of feeling like a student of the game. Then the chart loads: a 13-by-13 wall of colored squares. A hundred and sixty-nine little boxes with cryptic labels like “A5s” and “QTo,” some solid red, some solid blue, a few split down the middle like tiny flags, a percentage floating in the corner, and no legend anywhere.

You do what everybody does. You squint at it, hover over a square or two, decide it must make sense to someone with a math degree, and close the tab.

Here’s the good news: that wall of squares is the hand matrix, it’s the single most useful picture in poker, and you can learn to read it in about ten minutes. This post is those ten minutes. By the end, you’ll be able to look at any range chart and see what it’s saying – and, just as usefully, sketch one on a napkin.

First, the Shorthand

The notation comes first, because it labels every square.

Every square is labeled with two card ranks, and most get a third character. AKs means Ace-King suited – both cards the same suit, like the Ace and King of hearts. AKo means Ace-King offsuit – two different suits, like the Ace of hearts and the King of clubs. The s and o matter. They aren’t decoration; they mark genuinely different hands, and the matrix keeps them in entirely different neighborhoods.

Pairs get no suffix. AA is a pair of Aces, 77 is a pair of Sevens. The two cards of a pair are always different suits (there’s only one Ace of spades in the deck), so there’s nothing extra to mark.

That’s the whole alphabet: rank, rank, then s, o, or nothing.

The Lay of the Land

Now the grid itself. Picture a 13-by-13 grid. The thirteen card ranks run across the top, Ace on the left down to Deuce (the Two) on the right, and the same thirteen ranks run down the left side, Ace at the top to Deuce at the bottom. Every square is the meeting point of a row rank and a column rank, so every possible starting hand in Texas Hold’em lands in exactly one of the 169 squares.

The grid splits into three regions:

• The diagonal. Trace from the top-left corner down to the bottom-right corner. Those thirteen squares, where a rank meets itself, are the pocket pairs – two cards of the same rank. AA sits in the very top-left corner, then KK, QQ, JJ, stepping down to 22 in the bottom-right.
• Above the diagonal, the upper-right triangle, live the 78 suited hands.
• Below the diagonal, the lower-left triangle, live the 78 offsuit hands.

Thirteen pairs plus 78 suited plus 78 offsuit is 169. Every square accounted for.

A few landmarks to orient by. AA is the top-left corner. One square to its right is AKs. One square directly below it is AKo. Every suited square has an offsuit twin mirrored across the diagonal – same two ranks, opposite side of the line. And buried in the depths of the lower-left region, far from anything you’d ever want to play, sits 72o: Seven-Deuce offsuit, famously the worst starting hand in poker.

Why does this picture exist? Because when players talk about ranges – the full set of hands someone would play a certain way in a certain spot, rather than the one hand you’re guessing they have – this grid is where they draw them. A range is a highlighted region of the matrix. Learn the map, and every chart in every study tool becomes legible.

Why Ace-King Gets Two Squares

It might seem fussy that Ace-King occupies two squares while a single square holds a pair. There are two reasons, and they’re both load-bearing.

The first is that suited and offsuit versions of the same two ranks genuinely play differently. The suited version makes flushes (five cards of one suit), picks up extra draws (hands one card short of something big), and stays profitable in spots where the offsuit version has to give up. We wrote a whole post on why suited and offsuit are different hands; the short version is that the little s is worth real money, and a chart that lumped AKs and AKo together would blur two different answers.

The second reason is counting, and it’s the part most players never learn. The two squares don’t even contain the same number of hands.

The Math Hiding in the Squares

Here’s the thing the matrix quietly hides: the squares are not the same size. Not visually – combinatorially.

Take pocket Aces. There are four Aces in the deck, and a pair is any two of them: Ace of spades with Ace of hearts, spades with diamonds, spades with clubs, hearts with diamonds, hearts with clubs, diamonds with clubs. Six combinations. Every pair square holds exactly 6 combos.

Now Ace-King suited. Both cards must share a suit, and there are four suits, so there are exactly 4 combos. Every suited square holds 4.

Ace-King offsuit is the heavyweight. Four Aces, and for each one, three Kings of a different suit: 4 times 3 is 12 combos. Every offsuit square holds 12.

Add it all up: 13 pair squares at 6 combos is 78. 78 suited squares at 4 combos is 312. 78 offsuit squares at 12 combos is 936. Total: 78 plus 312 plus 936 equals 1,326 possible starting hands. That’s the real deck behind the tidy grid.

The consequence breaks most people’s intuition. One offsuit square weighs three times as much as a suited square. Add AKo to your range and you’ve added 12 hands; add AKs and you’ve added 4. Zoom out and the distortion gets dramatic: the suited triangle has 78 squares but only 312 of the 1,326 combos – about 24%. The offsuit triangle, the same 78 squares, holds 936 combos – about 71%. The thirteen pairs are the remaining 6% or so.

So a range that “looks big” on the chart can be small in actual hands, and vice versa. A player whose range is a broad wash of suited hands is playing far fewer combinations than the picture suggests. A player who adds a few rows of offsuit hands has ballooned their range while barely coloring the grid.

What “a 20% Range” Actually Means

Study tools label every range with a percentage: “15%,” “40%.” That number is always a share of the 1,326 combos, never a share of the 169 squares. A 20% range means roughly 265 combinations, whichever squares they come from.

One worked comparison shows why the difference matters. Suppose you highlighted every pocket pair and every suited hand – the whole diagonal plus the whole upper-right triangle. That’s 91 of the 169 squares, about 54% of the grid. Looks enormous. But it’s only 78 plus 312, or 390 of the 1,326 combos: about 29% of hands. Now highlight just the offsuit triangle instead. Fewer squares – 78, about 46% of the grid – but 936 combos, about 71% of all hands.

More than half the chart can be under a third of the hands, and less than half the chart can be over two-thirds. When a chart says 20%, trust the number, not your eyes.

Reading the Colors

So far we’ve talked about the board itself. The colors are the strategy painted on top.

A study tool assigns each action a color – one for raise, one for call, one for fold, whatever its scheme is. The easy hands look how you’d expect. Raise-color on AA from any seat: always raise. Fold-color on 72o: you can guess. Those are pure hands, one action 100% of the time, and every tool draws them the same way.

The interesting hands are the mixed ones, where the solution plays the hand one way some percentage of the time and another way the rest. Solvers – the computer programs that calculate GTO strategy (Game Theory Optimal, the mathematically balanced way to play) – mix on purpose, because for hands sitting near the edge of a range, committing to one action would make you predictable and exploitable. A mix is a frequency, not indecision. In practice: if a hand is mostly one action, take that action; on a true 50/50, pick either and don’t lose sleep.

What trips people up is that tools don’t agree on how to draw a mix. Some split the square – part one color, part another, like a tiny flag – so a square that’s three-quarters raise-color and one-quarter call-color means “raise this 75% of the time, call 25%.” Others color the whole square with the most frequent action and put the frequency into the shading, fading the square as the action gets less certain. Poker Sense’s Range Overview works that second way: a hand that raises 68% and calls 32% is one raise-colored square, dimmer than its always-raise neighbors, not a split one. So on a chart like that, a square that looks solid isn’t proof of a pure action – only a square at full strength is – and every mix is hiding in the shading. Click or tap the square and you get the whole story: each action, how often the solution takes it, and what it’s worth in EV.

The Shapes Ranges Make

Once you can read one chart, flip through a bunch of them and watch the shapes. They’re remarkably consistent.

Playable hands cluster in two places: along the pairs diagonal, and in the top-left where the big cards live. Every opening range (the hands you’d make the first raise with when nobody has entered the pot yet) is some version of that same blob – the diagonal, the top-left corner, and a fringe around them.

Suitedness stretches the blob. Because suited hands play so much better, the playable region reaches farther from the corner on the suited side of the diagonal than on the offsuit side. Suited Aces stay playable almost all the way along the top row; their offsuit twins die off quickly down the first column.

And position stretches everything. Position is where you sit relative to the dealer button, which decides how many players act after you – the later you act, the more information you have and the wider you can play, which is a pillar of good preflop foundations. An opening range from under the gun (the first seat to act, facing the whole table) is a compact blob, roughly the top 15% of hands: pairs, the best suited hands, and a thin slice of big offsuit cards like Ace-King and Ace-Queen. The Button (last to act after the flop) plays a range more than twice as wide – the blob swells down the diagonal, floods the suited triangle, and pushes visibly deeper into offsuit territory. Same grid, same player, completely different picture, purely because of the seat.

How to Actually Study the Thing

Here’s what not to do: stare at the wall of color trying to memorize 169 squares times six positions. Nobody learns that way, and you don’t need to.

Learn the borders instead. For each position, the interesting hands are the ones sitting right on the open-or-fold line – the edge of the blob. Everything comfortably inside is obvious (you were always playing Ace-Queen), and everything outside is irrelevant. The border hands are the actual lesson, and there are only a couple dozen per position.

Then learn the shape moves. Ranges widen as position improves. They stretch farther on the suited side. Pairs almost never leave. If you know the under-the-gun blob and you know the moves, you can reconstruct the rest from memory instead of recalling it.

And quiz yourself hand by hand, because recognition is not recall. Looking at a chart, everything seems obvious; dealt one hand in one seat with no chart in sight, you find out what you actually know. That’s how Poker Sense is built: it deals you practice hands and gives instant GTO feedback on each decision, and when an answer surprises you, the “Ask Why” coaching explains the reasoning behind the recommended play. The free tier gives you 20 hands and 3 AI coaching conversations a day, which is honestly about the right daily dose of border-patrol work.

The Bottom Line

The matrix is a map, not a test. Thirteen ranks by thirteen ranks makes 169 squares: pairs down the diagonal, suited hands above it, offsuit hands below. Pair squares hold 6 combos, suited squares 4, offsuit squares 12, and together that’s 1,326 starting hands – so percentages count combos, not squares, and the offsuit triangle quietly holds about 71% of the hands. Colors carry the strategy, and mixed hands are frequencies chosen on purpose – but check how your tool draws them, because a square that looks solid can be a shaded mix rather than a pure action. Learn the landmarks, learn the borders, and the wall of colored squares stops being intimidating and starts being the fastest way to see poker whole.