What is the worst hand in poker?
7♠2♥ 7-2 offsuit. It is the lowest pair of cards that cannot make a straight between them, they cannot make a flush together, and when either one pairs the board it makes the weakest pair available.
Nothing else competes for the title. 3♠2♥ 3-2 offsuit is nearly as bad and at least connects for a straight. 8♠2♥ 8-2 offsuit has a slightly better high card. But 7-2 has been the answer to this question for as long as people have asked it, and the maths agrees.
That is the entire useful content of most pages answering this search. Here is the part they leave out.
Nobody actually gets 7-2 wrong
Rank all 169 starting hands by how often players misplay them, and 7♠2♥ 7-2 offsuit comes out the hand people get wrong least often: played wrong just 1.5% of the time. Nothing else in the deck is close.
The reason is obvious once you see it. Nobody agonises over 7-2. You fold it, and folding is right almost every time it is dealt. A hand that is always an easy fold is a hand nobody loses money with.
Which means “the worst hand in poker” and “the hand that costs you the most” are two different questions, and only the second one is worth your attention.
The hands that actually cost you money
Our trainer deals preflop spots and scores each answer against a solver range, which leaves a record of which hands people get wrong. Across 1,043,544 answered decisions, these ten come out worst, adjusted so a hand is not penalised for turning up in harder spots. Method below.
| Hand | Played wrong | |
|---|---|---|
| A♠5♠ | A5 suited | 28.0% |
| Q♠J♥ | QJ offsuit | 27.7% |
| A♠J♥ | AJ offsuit | 27.3% |
| K♠J♠ | KJ suited | 27.1% |
| Q♠9♠ | Q9 suited | 26.6% |
| A♠J♠ | AJ suited | 25.9% |
| J♠J♥ | JJ | 25.6% |
| K♠Q♠ | KQ suited | 25.5% |
| Q♠8♠ | Q8 suited | 25.2% |
| A♠T♥ | AT offsuit | 25.0% |
Every one of them is a hand you would be pleased to look down at. That is the problem. They are good enough to play somewhere and bad enough to fold somewhere else, and the line between those two places moves depending on your seat and what happened before you. Nobody has to think about 7♠2♥ 7-2. Everybody has to think about A♠J♥ A-J offsuit, and one time in four they think wrong.
J♠J♥ Pocket jacks deserves its own line. It is a top-ten starting hand by raw strength and the seventh most misplayed hand in the game. Players get it wrong ten times more often than they misplay 3♠2♥ 3-2 offsuit.
So what are the worst hands, properly?
Both lists are true, they just answer different questions. By raw strength, the bottom of the deck looks like this:
| Hand | Why it is bottom of the deck | |
|---|---|---|
| 7♠2♥ | 7-2 offsuit | The lowest two cards that cannot make a straight together. Nothing works. |
| 3♠2♥ | 3-2 offsuit | Connects for a straight, which is the only thing it has. |
| 8♠2♥ | 8-2 offsuit | Marginally better high card than 7-2, and no straight between them. |
| 8♠3♥ | 8-3 offsuit | A gap too wide to connect, both cards too low to win unimproved. |
| 7♠3♥ | 7-3 offsuit | Same problem as 8-3: no straight, no flush, two weak cards. |
Beyond those, any two low unconnected cards of different suits belong in the same bracket. And low offsuit aces are weaker than they look: A♠2♥ A-2 offsuit makes a pair of aces with a useless kicker, which is exactly the hand that loses a big pot.
By what they cost the people playing them, the bottom of the deck is suited aces, offsuit broadways, and jacks.
Why “offsuit” does so much work in that list
Every hand in the table above is offsuit, and that is not a coincidence. Sharing a suit is worth more than most players give it credit for.
From the button, the solver opens 64.7% of suited hands and only 28.1% of offsuit ones. Counted another way: of the 78 suited combinations it opens 51 of them, against 23 of the 78 offsuit. Under the gun the split is starker still, 31.9% against 7.5%.
The flush itself is only part of it. A suited hand makes a flush around one time in twenty by the river, which on its own would not justify that gap. What it really buys is a hand that can keep going: something to continue with on a flop that misses you otherwise, and a draw that can win a big pot rather than a small one. That is why 7♠6♠ 7-6 suited opens from the button and 7♠6♥ 7-6 offsuit does not.
Why the almost-good hands are the expensive ones
Look at where the accuracy sits across the whole range and the shape is clear.
Trash offsuit hands are played wrong 2 to 4% of the time. Premium hands, aces through to A-K, get it wrong 6 to 13%. The wreckage is in the middle, at 22 to 28%.
Hands at either end have one answer. Aces are a raise. 7-2 is a fold. The hands in the middle have a different answer depending on position, on whether anyone has raised, and on how the table has behaved, and every one of those variables is another chance to get it wrong. Difficulty in poker is not about card strength. It is about how close the decision is.
Should you ever open 7-2?
No. Not from the button, not folded to you in the small blind, not anywhere. In all five opening charts it folds 100% of the time, with no mixed frequency attached to it. It is one of the few hands in poker with no exception worth remembering.
How these numbers were measured
Everything above comes from the PlusEV trainer, which deals real preflop spots and scores each answer against an exported solver range.
- 1,043,544 answered decisions.
- A hand appears only if it clears a minimum sample, both of answers and of distinct players, so no figure rests on a handful of people.
- Hands where the solver itself plays more than one action are excluded from these figures, because there is no single correct answer to score against.
- Accuracy is standardised by decision difficulty. Each decision is scored by how much expected value separates the best action from the second best, bucketed into ten bands, and each hand is compared within band before the bands are averaged with equal weight. Without that step, a hand that happens to appear in harder spots would look like a hand people are bad at.
- One caveat worth stating: the easy folds appear in fewer difficulty bands than the middling hands, because they are rarely close decisions. Their figures rest on a narrower base. The unadjusted numbers agree closely, so the ranking holds.
No individual player’s data appears anywhere here.
Quick answers
- What is the worst hand in poker? 7♠2♥ 7-2 offsuit.
- Which hand do players get wrong most often? A♠5♠ A5 suited, played wrong 28% of the time.
- Is 7♠2♥ 7-2 offsuit ever playable? No. It folds 100% of the time from every seat.
- Which strong hand is hardest to play? J♠J♥ pocket jacks, played wrong about one time in four.
- Why are bad hands easier than good ones? Because a bad hand has one answer and a middling hand has several, and the right one changes with position.
Knowing the list is not the same as playing it
You can read this page, agree with all of it, and still open A♠J♥ A-J offsuit under the gun on Friday night. Recognising that a hand is marginal and recalling what to do with it in three seconds with money in the pot are different skills, and only the second one pays.
The opening charts show what every seat should be doing with these hands. The trainer deals them to you until the answer stops needing to be looked up, which is where the 1,043,544 decisions behind this page came from in the first place.