OK, like a good boy scout I did a search and found this explanation from 2005. The problem is that it is entirely posted by people who obviously have a good understanding of Texas Hold Em poker, which I do not. I’m an engineer yet I cannot understand one single sentence in this entire thread !! It’s like I’m reading a manifesto from some crazy guy. So in simple terms, why is 7 and 2 no good?
They are the lowest value cards that are too far apart to form a straight. I think there is actually debate among poker nerds about whether 2-3 is worse, since that gives you a possible straight, but also means that any pair you get will be very low. And they have to be of different suits, otherwise you’d have a shot at hitting a flush.
Rather than go into a bunch of math, there are some relatively simple explanations for why it is especially a bad hand.
Offsuit is worse than suited for obvious reasons - flushes will require 4 cards from the board rather than 3 cards, flushes relying on the 2 are terrible, and those relying on the 7 are barely any better.
Why 2-7 and not something like 2-6 or 2-4? Notice that 2 and 7 are separated by 5 (7 - 2 = 5). In order to make a straight, you will need 4 cards from the board. The 2 and 7 cannot both be used in your straight. Worse yet, any straights they do form will be among the worst possible straights. The best case is a 3-7 straight or a funky gut shot draw, which will cost you more trying to draw to them than you will win the few times it comes up.
So that leaves stuff like full houses, 3 of a kind, pairs, etc. And for those, 2 and 7 are not especially high rank, so they will often be beat by other hands, e.g. if a 2 shows up on the board, it gets beat by any other pair.
As mentioned in that thread, it depends on how many people are at the table. 2-3 offsuit is worse against a single opponent. But at a 10 person table, you’re playing significantly fewer hands anyway (or should be) against more hands collectively, so the chances of the occasional straight outweigh the benefit of having a 7 over a 3.
I.e. when you are playing against 9 other hands, not 1, the higher value card is much less likely to matter.
Mathematically, 72 will beat 32 most of the time heads up if you just let the cards play out. You can put this stuff in here:
To expand on Antibob’s point, the reason 32 is may not be quite as bad - this is not really totally quantifiable - is that it has the potential to make a better hand that will result in more betting and more money to win later on in the hand, as opposed to if you just deal the rest of the cards without betting. You cannot really entirely add this up in a way that clearly tells us which hand is worse, because the possible subsequent decisions made by you and the other players and how it affects your odds and the pot are limitless in number.
That said, both hands are so close to each other in awfulness it really doesn’t matter.
In short, a 2-3 leading to a straight is a lot more likely than 2-7.
2-7 is lousy in Omaha HiLo, too. “Hey, I flopped a low! Oh…”
Why wouldn’t the best case be a 7-J straight?
7-J straight is better, but with 8-9-10-J on the board you’d have to be pretty damn sure nobody has a Q. At least with a 3-7 straight you probably aren’t losing to better straight (although you could be if they have 7-8).
What @Great_Antibob is saying is that, among the hands higher than 3-of-a-kind, a 7-high straight is the only one you are likely to at least split the pot with (or possibly something random like 4-5-6-8 on the board, but even there you could lose to 7-9).
Ah, yes, I realized this just right after I posted.
As above.
It’s not a good hand, in any event. Whether or not it’s the “worst” depends on more than pure comparison of one hand to another, which can cause confusion.
Likewise AA, while still far and away the best hand in a head to head matchup, loses value with a ton of people at the table, though still the one hand you would want to have the most.
I used to play a lot of online poker and they had different badges you could earn for winning different hands. One was going all in with 7-2 off suit and winning.
That works for a Big Blind Special. I got 7-2 off suit as the BB once, and about 5 other players just limped in, so I got to see the 7-7-2 flop for free.
No one saw that coming. I just called everything that was bet until I was all-in, and took the whole thing.
I got that beat, literally and figuratively. A ten-person tournament, and I survived to be heads-up. Had 4-8 of clubs and the other player called, so I saw the flop for free. 5-6-7 of clubs.
Is there a badge for hitting a three-card, inside, straight flush on the flop?
One point that others have alluded to, but haven’t explicitly stated: In Texas Hold-em, if you have two bad cards but do by chance happen to make a good hand with them and the public cards, it’s the public cards doing most of the work, there, and so there’s a good chance that someone else has an even better hand using those same public cards. Like, if you have the two of clubs and some other card of another suit, and four clubs come up in the public cards, you’ve got a flush… but so does anyone else who has any club at all, and theirs is better than yours.
It’s still possible, of course, that the public cards will instead include all of the other three deuces, and so you end up with a four of a kind, and nobody else could possibly beat that. The fact that any hand can, potentially, win is a big part of why poker is such an enduringly popular game. But it’s not likely.
I was told that 7-2 offsuit is a statistical underdog against any random 2 cards, in Texas Hold’m.
But it is statistical favorite against specific off-suit hands of 6-2, 5-2, 4-2, 3-2, 6-3, 5-3, 4-3, 6-4, 5-4, 6-5) but the chances that these types go head to head against each other a rare as they are usually folded preflop.
a hand like 5-4 offsuit has marginally “better” equity (than 7-2 o) against an outstanding hold em hand like overpairs because it “only” needs three cards to make a straight whereas 7-2o needs 4 cards to make straight. but remember “Better equity” doesn’t mean “Good Equity.”
A 2 and a 7 are indications of a really bad hand. I’d say the worst hand is one that looks like it will turn out to be a better hand but the odds are still against it.
I think it depends on the table. With a full ring of 10 I’d rather have the 23o, but heads up I’d rather have the 7.
That is why you should raise 7-2 offsuit to get to heads up! 