Playing Ace King in Cash Games

To my mind Ace King is possibly the easiest hand to play in all of poker, assuming you are focused on making the correct decision.  Now remember that I am talking about cash games, Ace King is a different beast in tournaments because if you stack off in a tournament you are done.  Let's run through a few scenarios, I am going to focus on 6 handed play because poker is about isolating and picking up pots that were not supposed to be yours, it is hard to do that in a 9 handed game.  

Scenario One: 

You are in late position with a raise in front of you, no matter the opponent you should raise here.  Re-raising (or 3 betting) does a few things for you it allows you to take control over the hand, a large percentage of the time your opponent will not 4 bet you, so every time they fold you have won a pot without making your hand and every time they call you are rarely worse than 45% to win the hand.  Over time that percentage play equals big dollars.  

Scenario Two: 

You are out of position, say under the gun or in the blinds and someone in late position has raised.  If you profile that player simply they should be opening with a pretty big range of hands that they would be willing to lay down against your aggression.  Personally I like overbetting the pot slightly to sway the odds in my favor a bit.  Even with that you should still hit the hand a good amount of the time and for anyone that calls behind with a hand like 88 or 99 you will make their lives miserable and statistically their edge would be nullified by the fact that they likely will not 4 bet you with hands like that, so even a board like Q 10 4 is almost impossible to call with.  Statistically you are right to push against any 4 bets but I would say you want to be wary of your stack size compared to your opponents.  Open shoving with both you and your opponent very deep is akin to playing BlackJack and that is not what we are trying to do.

To Continuation Bet or not to Cbet

In scenario one you are going to want to cbet almost all of the time, while you will run into a few check raises and such overall the play should be profitable enough to make it every time.  In scenario two I would suggest taking board texture into account but I would still cbet 90% of the time at least.  

Protect your hand

Poker Pros have a saying "don't go broke with just a pair".  Most people playing Ace King play it way too passively hoping to not get stacked.  Which is exactly why they get stacked.  When you are three betting and making continuation bets the pot is getting big enough to fight for, I am not saying to call with Ace high but if you hit a pair you have to have a stone cold read to fold that hand because you could have your opponent dominated completely.

If you did not hit and you get called just fold

Lastly fold if you have cbet and you get a caller but you have not hit an Ace or King.  You will almost always need to play to get lucky and simply put you do not have the odds to make that call typically.  I will say that if you are in position you should continue betting a good majority of the time, this makes it very difficult for weaks holdings to call you out of position.  

I'll try to add to this article as question arise so feel free to use the comments section to ask anything.   I wrote this article for beginning players, as always in poker "it depends" applies, so keep that in mind as you move higher up the poker ladder.

3 responses to Playing Ace King in Cash Games

musavvir says:
Thursday, February 25, 2010

Very neat article.

Its always nice to study scenarios.

We want similar articles.

Doomsayer says:
Saturday, January 23, 2010

ty Beanie, good read as always

Beanie says:
Saturday, January 23, 2010

sort of funny when you think of the hand I just posted in the forums.

Leave a reply