Poker Game Tips

Weve touched on playing AK before on this blog, but since I see people talking about this topic time and time again, well probably be touching on it many times in the future too including in this post. Getting right to the heart of the matter, the biggest problems people have when playing this hand is that they either undervalue or overvalue AK based on their situation.

For example, lets say that youre in early position with AK and you make a 5X BB raise that everybody folds to except for one player, who re-raises to 10X BB. Now this player has shown an extremely tight preflop range in previous hands, and they havent re-raised anybody with less than JJ. Even assuming you are calling the opponent when they have JJ or QQ, they are around a 57% favorite (disregarding suited cards); if they have pocket kings (69% favorite) or pocket aces (93% favorite), you are way behind. In any case, with such a tight opponent range at hand, you are better off not overvaluing your hand, and folding in these situations.

Of course, you cant always be worried about people holding a big pocket pair since this leads to undervaluing a very good hand. The majority of the time, youll be ahead of the table preflop, and the trick is to realize when youre ahead based on the specific situation you are in. For instance, if you saw somebody shove preflop with K-T earlier in the session, you are getting +EV by calling their shove with AK.

Overall though, unless you have solid information such as this, you will be folding to major preflop aggression most of the time with AK. After all, AK is not a made hand, and youre going to need to hit outs in order to profit with these cards. So dont treat AK like JJ or QQ when you dont have any info on the opponent(s) whos raising.