One of the most popular hold'em variants is royal hold'em, which involves playing the normal hold'em game with a 20-card deck created by removing all of the cards from a standard 52-card deck except for the Tens, Jacks, Queens, Kings and Aces. While the betting format remains the same as regular hold'em, the game is usually dealt six-handed because of the limited number of cards available. Additionally, the modified deck changes play significantly.

In the game of royal hold'em, there are 190 different combinations of pre-flop cards, compared to 1326 for traditional hold'em. Each pocket pair has about a 3.2% chance of being dealt, and each unpaired hand has about a 8.4% chance of being dealt. The best hands in terms of playability are, in order, AA, AK, and KK. In this game, AK plays better than KK because of its ability to make Aces full, and royal hold'em is mostly about making full houses. That is, KK suffers greatly from reverse implied odds. If you only played these three hands from all positions, you wouldn't be as tight as you might think, since they account for 14.8% of the starting hands.

In late position, you can try to steal the blinds with AQ and QQ as well, which will bring your total opening range to about 26.4% of hands. Being much looser than this isn't advisable since it's very hard to outplay an opponent post-flop in royal hold'em, even in position. However, to mix things up, you should play slightly worse hands like JJ and AJ some small percentage of the time to give the image that you're much looser than you really are.