The worst mistake you can make is to let in an inferior hand that gets lucky on the flop for cheap and then relieves you of your chips. Besides, you can often outplay your opponent later in the hand even when you have neither.įinally, you encourage bad beats by not thinning the field preflop. If you just call you’re missing a lot of value when you do flop a big hand or big draw. The fact is that Ace-King is a big hand that you should welcome seeing. You shouldn’t change your overall poker strategy based on past bad beats or missed opportunities. Many players get timid with this hand because they’ve either lost too many big pots with it against a random set or two pair or they don’t know what to do if they don’t flop at least a pair. I will just flat-call rarely preflop with AK (namely the other 20-30 percent of the time) unless someone has made a big raise in front of me. You’ll almost always raise pre-flop with A-K, unless it’s been raised and/or re-raised before the action gets to you. I’ll usually raise 4-5 times the blind in looser games to try and thin the field.

You build up a pot that you try to take down later.

You probably have the best hand right now and by raising you can accomplish one of two things (either of which are desirable): This goes for early, middle, and late positions. In no-limit ring games I will raise about 70-80 percent of the time whether I am the first one in the pot or following a few limpers.

Since you’re certainly going to miss more often than you hit, it is important to take the lead early in the hand and seize control. However, one of the key aspects to remember is that the odds say you will only flop a pair about 1 out of 3 times. Unless one of your opponents has the rare holding of pocket AA or KK you are no worse than a coin-flip in the hand (remember that two overcards are about a coin-flip pre-flop favorite against a smaller pocket pair). One of the beauties of Big Slick is the pre-flop pressure that you can put on your opponents.

Ninja Tip for A-K in Low-Stakes Tournaments.

Can ace be low in texas holdem