Pocket Aces..... The Best Hand To Go Broke With !!

I know we all sit there playing in every sitngo hoping every hand we get dealt is pocket aces, even though we all know that this very hand , even though it is the BEST hand in poker is the hand that has gotten us busted out of a game more times than we would like to think possible. Please read the following post which was written by Michael Neilson and hopefully can give a better way to play the aces , by avoiding busting out with it and maximizing its potential.


Anyone who is familiar with poker, especially texas holdem, knows that pocket aces is the best starting hand you can have out of a total of 169 possible starting hands. Why? Because before the flop this hand is way ahead of every other combination. A pair of aces beats everything else. However, once the flop comes, aces can be way behind very quickly.

Lets cover some odds. Pocket kings through pocket twos all have about an 11% chance of flopping trips against pocket aces. This number has been rounded up slightly. It also has about an 8% chance of catching by the river if trips don't happen on the flop. So roughly 20% of the time pocket aces is going to lose to any other pocket pair. So what happens if we introduce another pocket pair into the equation? For this example we have pocket aces up against pocket kings and pocket sixes. For those of you who are very detail oriented the aces are of clubs and diamonds, the kings are spades and hearts, and the sixes are clubs and spades. Guess what happened to the winning percentage for the aces? It went down of course! The pocket aces before the flop are now only about 65% to win with a 0.25% chance of a split pot. The king before the flop is about 19% to win and the sixes are about 16%. So what happens if someone spikes that 11% for trips? Aces now only have about a 14% chance to win.

Now let's examine a 6 handed table. The percentages may surprise you. Pocket aces against the following hands is only about 33% to win - king queen suited of spades (16% to win), seven two offsuit (8%), three four of hearts (18%), jack ten offsuit (10%), and eight ten suited of diamonds (13%). I'm sure those numbers don't add up to 100%, its all roughly rounded. Three four suited is the surprising one. Then again the aces don't share a suit with it, but the same applies for king queen suited, which has a lower chance of hitting. This has to do with the fact that three four suited can be both an up or down straight draw (2-6 or 3-7 or even 4-8), whereas the odds against the up straight draw happening for king queen has diminished due to two aces being missing from the odds.

Imagine what happens if you throw in another 3 or four players for a full table. Those odds go down even more. You have to push out your opponents when you're holding pocket aces or you will more than likely go broke. That's just how the hand plays out. Less players in the hand means better odds for you. Truth be told you could be holding 72 offsuit and your odds of winning increase when you only have 1 opponent, especially when you figure in bluffing, table image, etc.

The problem with pocket aces, especially online, is when you raise a lot of players know that you're holding something good and they want to crack it. Online players know that aces get cracked more often in online poker so they're willing to try it. The reason behind this is simple, it's not a completely random shuffle as it's a computer program trying to randomly shuffle. Most people can't do a perfect shuffle so imagine trying to get a computer program that understands only 1's and 0's (on off) as commands trying to do it. With so many variables that come into play it would be very difficult to include every possible variable. People mess up shuffling, computers can't mess up, thus probabilities are slightly different online than at your local home game. At your home game cards typically don't go 1,2,1,2 so yeah, odds vary from place to place. Sad but true. This doesn't change the fact that you must push out as many opponents as possible when holding aces. Even if the odds change 20% in favor of your opponent due to a bad shuffle you still stand a better chance of beating one opponent than nine.