Free Texas Hold'em Preflop Range Charts: All 15 Grids, Opening and Big Blind Defence

Preflop range charts are not for memorising, they are for checking against. You finish a session, look back and ask yourself “should I really have opened K5s in the cutoff?” — this post exists for that one glance.

Start with what a preflop range is: not how a particular hand should be played, but “the whole set of starting hands I have decided to play from this seat, in this spot”. Hold’em’s starting hands sort into 169 types, and a range draws a line through those 169 — inside the line you enter, outside it you fold. Drawn as a chart, it is the 13x13 grid you see below. If “range” is still an unfamiliar idea, read section 3 of the full guide to position, “your range is simply which hands you decided to play”, and the charts will go down much more easily.

The 15 grids below are the default ranges of the preflop trainer in RushCraft for Windows, drawn cell by cell from the values in the software. They are not solver output; they are an approximation that is good enough — section 5 sets out where their limits are.

All 15 are listed right here on this page, free, with no signup, no email and no download button standing between you and the charts. Bookmark them or screenshot them, as you like.

Opening rangesHow to read the gridBB callingBB 3-bettingWhere the ranges come from

If this is your first 13x13 grid, jump to how to read the grid first; thirty seconds is enough.

1. Opening Ranges: Everyone Folds and You Are First In

Nobody in front of you has raised, and the action is on you. Coloured cells are a raise; everything else folds.

In rangeNot in rangeThe hand names on the diagonal are there to orient you

Three things are worth stopping on.

From 11.2% to 46.9%, a factor of four. The same K9s is a fold under the gun and a raise on the button. Position is not a bonus, it is part of the hand’s strength (how position changes what a hand is worth).

The top-right fills up before the bottom-left. Every chart grows the suited side first: in the cutoff chart K3s opens while K3o does not come close. Being suited is only worth a few percentage points of equity, but what it buys is a reason to keep going when you miss — and missing is the normal outcome after the flop.

The BTN and SB charts are identical. That is not a layout mistake: the two positions return the same string in the software. In practice, opening from the small blind means only one player left to beat, but you never have position after the flop, so most people open somewhat tighter there than on the button. It is a rough edge left by this first approximation, and section 5 comes back to it.

2. How to Read the Grid

13 × 13 = 169 cells, which is exactly the number of starting-hand types in Hold’em. Rows (down the left) are the higher card, columns (across the top) the lower one.

• The diagonal (top left to bottom right) = pocket pairs. These 13 cells keep their hand names as the line you navigate by
• Above the diagonal = suited. AKs sits in row A, column K
• Below the diagonal = offsuit. AKo sits in row K, column A

The same AK occupies two cells, one above the diagonal and one below, and their fates often differ: against a cutoff open, the big blind’s 3-bet chart contains both AKo and AKs; but on that same chart AQs is in and AQo is not. Find the diagonal first, then decide whether you are going up or down.

On a desktop, hovering over any cell shows that cell’s full hand name. Phones have no mouse, so count across from the hand names on the diagonal.

One more thing changes how you should read the percentages: a cell is not one unit of weight. Each pocket pair is 6 actual combinations, each suited hand 4, each offsuit hand 12. So although the button’s opening chart lights up 99 of 169 cells (nearly six in ten), it only accounts for 46.9% of all starting hands — each cell in that filled-in top-right corner weighs a third of one in the bottom-left. The percentage next to every chart’s caption is always computed from combinations, not by counting cells.

3. Big Blind Defence: Calling

A different spot: you are in the big blind, somebody opens from one of the positions, and everyone else folds. These five are the calling ranges for that spot, split by the opener’s seat.

Defending the big blind and opening are two different jobs, because the money sits differently: your 1bb is already out there, calling only tops up the difference, and your pot odds are the best at the table — the price being that you speak first on every street after the flop.

Which is why these five charts follow the opener. Against UTG’s tight 11.2%, you defend only 18 cells; against the small blind’s wide 46.9%, you defend 99. What you defend against is not your own hand, it is his range — the same point the 3-bet post makes.

(The CO and BTN calling charts are also the same string, for the same reason as the opening pair.)

4. Big Blind Defence: 3-Betting

The other side of the same spot: these five are the big blind’s re-raising ranges.

These five charts hide a rule. Every cell on them also appears on the calling charts in the previous section — all five sets, no exceptions. So when the two charts overlap, the order the software resolves them in is fixed:

3-bet wins. A hand on both charts is a 3-bet; a hand on the calling chart only is a call; a hand on neither is a fold.

Subtract the overlap and the full picture of big blind defence looks like this:

Opener	3-bet	Call (overlap removed)	Total defence
UTG	1.7%	6.3%	8.0%
MP	1.7%	20.5%	22.2%
CO	3.3%	24.3%	27.6%
BTN	5.3%	22.3%	27.6%
SB	4.1%	43.4%	47.5%

Those five numbers in the first column are where the 3-bet post’s “the value skeleton is only about 3%” comes from — they are the part strong enough to re-raise on its own merit, with no bluffs in it. And the A5s, QTs and JTs that show up in the row facing a small blind open are the only hands across all 15 charts selected for something other than raw strength: small blind opens, you are in the big blind, and that is the one combination where you have position after the flop.

5. Where These Ranges Come From, and Where They Stop

These 15 sets are the defaults of RushCraft’s preflop trainer — the numbers the software starts with the first time you open it, and the file they live in describes them as a “GTO approximation”. The order of action six-handed is UTG → MP/HJ → CO → BTN → SB → BB, so:

• There are only five opening ranges. The big blind has none — if everyone folds to the big blind the hand is already over, so there is no “open” to make
• The three duplicated sets are not typos. BTN and SB opening, CO and BTN big-blind calling, UTG and MP big-blind 3-betting each share one range. The first version merged spots that were close enough
• Defending only 8.0% against UTG is on the tight side. The big blind’s pot odds advantage means real defending frequencies are usually a good deal wider. Treat it as a core that will not get you into trouble, not as a ceiling
• It knows nothing about stack depth or opponent type. Who is across from you and how deep the table is are things these 15 charts cannot see. That is what reading an opponent’s stats is for

The last thing matters most: these are defaults, not rules. The hand range editor in the software lets you change any cell, and the trainer then judges by your version. The 15 charts here are a starting point, not a destination.

6. Turning the Charts Into Reflexes

There is a distance between reading a chart and making a decision, and the only thing that shortens it is repetition. That is what the preflop trainer does: it deals a hand, gives you a spot, you press fold / call / open-3-bet, and the judgment comes from the 15 charts above.

The two kinds of spot are judged differently, which is worth knowing first:

• Opening spots judge only whether to enter — if the hand is in range you may not fold, and calling or raising both count as correct
• Big blind defence spots judge the action — following the order from the previous section: 3-bet first, then call, everything else folds

At the end of a round it tells you which hands you got wrong and draws each one back onto the 13x13 grid — which cell you were wrong about is more useful than how many you were wrong about.

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These 15 charts come down to three sentences:

• Opening follows your seat: from UTG’s 11.2% to the button’s 46.9%, position is strength in itself
• Defending follows his seat: 8.0% against UTG, 47.5% against the small blind. What you defend against is his range, not your hand
• Overlap follows an order: the 3-bet charts sit entirely inside the calling charts, and 3-bet resolves first

That is as far as range charts go. They do not know the other player’s VPIP or how he played the last hand — those numbers are read separately. But before you know him at all, playing these 15 charts correctly already puts you ahead of most of the table.

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A word on where these ranges come from. RushCraft is a Windows desktop tool I write myself. Its main job is taking apart your Natural8 cash-game hand histories (regular Hold’em and Rush & Cash) to compute your statistics; and the practice centre inside it needs no hand history at all — open the preflop trainer and it starts dealing hands and asking: fold, call or raise? The judgment uses the 15 charts above, and a wrong answer gets drawn back onto the 13x13 grid so you can see which cell it was. Disagreeing with a range is fine too: the hand range editor lets you change any cell to your own version.

Save this page and come back to it after a session. Check against it often enough, though, and you will find what actually holds you up is not whether you remember — it is those two seconds of hesitation when the action reaches you. Download a copy and run a few rounds; it beats reading this ten times.

The way those two seconds disappear is called deliberate practice: repeating the same judgment until it no longer passes through thought and becomes muscle memory. It needs no scheduling — a minute before you sit down, a dozen or so hands, is enough. A single session shows no difference at all, but this kind of practice accumulates, and a few months later it turns up in your statistics rather than only in your impression of yourself.