Ranking of AK among best starting hands

[Joey2Cards]

To answer your query as to why you find AK harder to play than 22 it's because most of the time 22 is useless after the flop and can be chucked away. Easy.

You can get trapped with AK if you don't realise that it's a drawing hand. If you don't hit, you have nothing. It's easy to forget this because it looks so sexy.

[4CardStraight]

I think theres quite a few areas here unexplored.

First, the nature of the question. How do we rank AK among the best starting hands. It depends. It depends on game format (limit, deepstackNL, shortstackNL/tourney), it depends on how many hands see flops etc. Why? Because hand values are not absolute. Our hands strength measured by strict equity, or measured by Expected Value, depends on the strength of our opponents cards. If we know our opponent only plays pairs for instance, AK has way more value than 22 does.... Every time we play 22 we are dominated, and only 2/13 times we are dominated with AK.

Second I think people are missing that both hands have a problem post flop when they whiff. Many times you are fold the best hand. bottom underpair unimproved still beats all unpaired hands, which might be a majority of our opponents holding. Same is true of AK. The last poster even suggested that if you dont hit with AK you have nothing... well thats just plain wrong... you have a hand that is the best non-pair hand, and you are OFTEN likely ahead. If you build a big pot at this point, though, you are OFTEN way behind and possibly drawing dead.

The ranking of hands not only depends on their innate preflop strength (equity using things like pokerstove), but also the range of our opponent or opponents, the mixture of hand types they are willing to play, the format of the game we are playing, the size of the stacks involved, how well our opponents play post flop, how good we are at reading hands, etc.

Thus, no real definitive hand ranking guides exist... I think using +EV based on actual play is probably nearly the best. Lets maximize our expectation with each decision.

[Joey2Cards]

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The last poster even suggested that if you dont hit with AK you have nothing... well thats just plain wrong... you have a hand that is the best non-pair hand, and you are OFTEN likely ahead.



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This is precisely the thought process of someone who has trouble playing AK. Not saying that YOU do, but this is why people get carried away with their two pretty little cards.