Overplaying AK

Originally posted on September 9, 2011 at OnTiltRadio.com

“Many talented people… fail simply because they could not leave a loser when they no longer had the best of it” — David Sklansky

Playing MTTs you will lose more money with AK, a.k.a. ‘Big Slick’, than any other hand, so playing it proficiently and profitably becomes very important. The most profitable way of playing AK is planning how you are going to play the hand postflop, whether you hit or miss the flop. Playing AK preflop is also very similar to playing Aces, in the regards that you’re rarely ever limping in and almost never folding.

    

An advanced strategy to playing AK in MTTs is to cbet flops with any paint cards 100% of the time, when checked to or first to act. A high percentage of the time your opponents will miss the flop or be holding a smaller pair. If you cbet the flop that you missed, and get check raised, it will be easy to let go. When you cbet a missed flop and get called, then you have to reevaluate the hand on the turn and proceed with caution.

Knowing when to shove AK and understanding your ‘M’ is also very important. Your ‘M’ refers to your tournament life, which is simply your stack size divided by the blinds and antes added together (Introduced in the ‘Harrington On Holdem’ series). With a low ‘M’ of 6 or below, you should always be shoving ‘all-in’ with AK. If your ‘M’ is 7 or higher, you should be making your standard raise. I will be getting more into the ‘M’ theory in later blogs.

As an example of playing AK profitably, lets say that we have AK offsuit and the flop comes K, 7, 3 rainbow. Now we have to be careful not to overplay our hand. If we start out check raising here, it will be very obvious that we hit the flop and will most likely drive out some of the weaker hands. If we just check call, we might be able to get action from those weaker hands. A better play in this spot would be to avoid slow playing and lead out at the pot with a cbet just like you would any other time. This will help build the pot and also prevents our opponents from catching a free card that could cost us on the turn.

Crunching the numbers: AK preflop
PreFlop Match Up               Favorite
AK versus QQ                    48% to 52%
AK versus AJ                      70% to 30%
AK versus Q10                   57% to 43%
AK versus 72                      68% to 32%
AK versus 54 suited           59% to 41%

Stack Size divided by (SB+BB + ANTES)  = M Note: no antes just divide the blinds

Spending time thinking about AK will make you more comfortable playing it and also, make you more money over time. Hopefully this blog has given you some ideas on how to best play AK.

“Keep getting your money in good, that’s all you can do”

Mike Owens (HOLDEMAG)

CheckRaze.com