Ace King is a great hand. It is one of the best starting hands and really allows a player to be creative. As you move up higher in the stakes, however, I believe people make some fundamentally flawed plays with AK. AK becomes a rush to get all your chips in the middle and play for a big pot against Queens or Jacks. If you played 1000 pots against QQ with AK, however, you would end up on the rail sooner rather than later. AK is a very powerful hand, but that power is often misused.

Once you get to higher levels, the general philosophy with AK is to always raise preflop. I’ve seen seasoned pros raise a 3 bet that they know won’t fold with AK, just to get it all in the middle. If they get called, they are either behind a little, behind a lot, or going to chop against another AK. This hardly seems optimal from an objective point of view. The real problem I see with AK is the preflop push.

Now I am not saying I don’t ever push with AK preflop. You will see me do it a lot. But you will also see me pushing with high pairs preflop also. Let’s illustrate this in an example:

Player A is a very good, aggressive player. He charges you to outdraw his big hands. He has one tendency that a lot of higher players do, however. He never pushes with big pairs because he doesn’t want to lose the value of them.

Let’s say I have Queens in the cut off. There is a raise of 175 to me, and I make it 600 to go. Player A in the button has 5000 and I cover. Player A then throws all his chips in the middle, and is supremely confident he can’t be behind and that I will probably fold. Against a tricky player, I might lay it down. But we know Player A would certainly have made it 1900 with Aces or Kings. So he basically has to have AK. The original raiser folds. The key to remember about the original raiser is that he very well could have some of Player A’s outs. Hands such as KQ and AJ are very probable hands for him to have. So if he now only has 5 outs instead of 6, it doesn’t become a coin-flip at all. It is more like 3:2 or worse. Since I know that this will be the case a lot of the times, this is an easy call. No help comes and he announces to the rail he can never win a race.

So how should Player A improve his decision making here? Start by putting some trickiness in your game. If you wake up with Aces on the button in that same situation, sometimes raise to 1900, but you can also throw it all in preflop. A lot of players will put you on AK and call in a heart beat, drawing to two outs. They might be weary of the 1900 dollar raise, but no one in their right mind would shove with Aces right?

This leads to another move you can add to your arsenal. Sometimes with AK, make it 1900 to go instead of shoving. Then no matter what comes on the flop, get it all in behind them. You are surely representing Aces or Kings, and Queens will find a tough call here, if you haven’t improved on the flop to have the winner straight up. You can also find a fold preflop with AK. It’s not a bad play, as you have nothing invested. Sometimes waiting for the next hand is your best move of all.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 13th, 2006 at 8:51 am and is filed under Poker Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.