Median Best Holdem Starting Hand

[Aisthesis]

99 sounds about right for a 10 player table. I think the difficulty is going to be selecting the ranking system, because that's very much going to depend on the context. On the Landrum system, just counting through, I get AJo as including hand #99.

I notice the ranking system you cite definitely differs from my more intuitive rankings, which gave me the ATo for 9 players. I notice 77 is put higher than AJs there, fairly large suited bonus, etc.

I actually already find it useful just to keep in the back of my mind in various situations. But I think that in order to nail it down further, one would need to enumerate precisely the situation we're talking about, then do the ranking of hands on that basis.

In light of stack-sizes in tournament play, one might also consider other percentages than just the 50% mark (and this method makes that fairly straightforward despite the fact that we're dealing with large numbers).

Do you know how well the Landrum list correlates with Sklansky-Karlsson? At the moment, I'm in a rush and don't have time to call them up and compare.

Hopefully some discussion will get started on where one can go with these things. I'm thinking there are several (particularly, late) tournament situations to which it's likely applicable, but I'm a little hazy still as to how to define them precisely.