Walking Back to Houston With Anna or Waingro

By James McManus

As hole cards in no-limit hold'em, an ace with a king is one of the thorniest hands to play without bleeding your stack or draining it down to the felt. You may be fingering the two highest unpaired cards, but your hand is an underdog to even a lowly pair of deuces - an underdog, in fact, to every pocket pair. Kings, for example, are a 70 percent favorite over A-K, aces a whopping 92.6 percent, while aces beat deuces only 80 percent of the time. Yet players routinely fold deuces before the flop but raise with A-K.

With good reason. When holding A-K, at least six cards - the other three aces and kings - will strikingly improve your hand, not to mention the Q-J-10 and one-suited flops that give you the nuts or big draws. But only two cards improve the 2-2. Because every nondeuce that appears on the board will be an overcard to your pair, it becomes increasingly difficult to call bets if you don't flop a deuce.

Yet the fact remains that, heads-up with one player all-in, 2-2 will outrace A-K 53 percent of the time. Even more surprising, perhaps, is that A-K is only a 62 percent favorite against a raggedy hand like 8-6. In a four-way pot, deuces are about a 4-1 underdog, A-K only a 2-1 dog. These odds are more relevant in limit hold'em, however; no-limit pots are more likely to be contested heads-up.

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