Two large-suited cards have high-pair potential, flush potential, and some straight potential.
The straight potential is limited; with A 
K you can only flop a gutshot straight draw, but it will be a draw to the highest possible straight and will include overcard pair draws.
Do you see a pattern here? The really powerful starting hands have multiple ways to win.
This is another important factor involved in determining the value of a starting hand, not just its likelihood of winning game, but its likelihood of winning a large pot.
That’s why in a very loose, very aggressive game, pocket pairs can be valuable starting hands-not because they’ll win a lot of pots, but because the pots they do win will be very large.
In many very loose games, you need not fear a raise pre-flop, because the pots you win when you do win will be large enough to cover the cost of calling a few raises.
With small-or medium sized pocket pairs, you’ll probably have to hit three of a kind on the flop to win.
That won’t happen very often. In an aggressive game, the other players raise and reraise for you on those times that you do.
Often a poker game develops a particular dynamic where some aspects of the game seem to become routine, automatic, and very predictable.
Player behavior before the flop is one such aspect.
I don’t mean that you can predict what an individual player is going to do (although sometimes you can), but you do often know what the result of individual actions are-you can often be very sure that four to six to three players will see the flop and someone will raise from an early or middle position.
Whenever a table dynamic like that happens, you’ve got what I call a stable game condition,and you can make strategy adjustments to exploit this stability.
Hand value changes dramatically as game conditions change.
The popular belief is that there is shift in relative hand values when game conditions change-for example,in a very loose game, suited cards go up in value, and in a tight game, high cards go up in value.
That’s true as far as it goes, but it’s a simplistic view.
It’s not just relative hand values that change with game conditions, it’s how hands derive value and how hand value relates to other aspects of the game, such as position, that changes.
A tight game is struggle for the antes.
An aggressive game is a game of strategy and deception
A passive game is game of money flows from the bad players to the good players.
A loose game is a game of money and odds.
Pick the Right Table / Picking a Seat / Theories of Poker / Betting Theory: The Odds
A Theory of Starting Hand Value
A Theory of Flop Play: Counting Outs and Evaluating Draws
The Dynamics of Game Conditions / Table Image / Player Stereotypes
Women and Poker / Spread-Limit Games / Double Bet on the End Games / Kill Games
Short-handed Games / Tournaments / No-limit and Pot-Limit Poker
