Anyone familiar with poker, especially texas holdem, knows that pocket aces are the best starting hand you can have out of a total of 169 possible starting hands. Why? Because before the flop this hand is way ahead of any other combination. A pair of aces beats everything else. However, once the flop comes, the aces can get far behind very quickly.
Let’s cover some probabilities. Heads up kings of two have about an 11% chance of stumbling on the flop against pocket aces. This number has been slightly rounded. You also have about an 8% chance of catching in the river if the trips don’t happen on the flop. So about 20% of the time, pocket aces are going to lose to any other pocket pair. So what happens if we plug another pocket pair into the equation? For this example, we have pocket aces against pocket kings and pocket sixes. For those of you who are very detail oriented, aces are clubs and diamonds, kings are spades and hearts, and sixes are clubs and spades. Guess what happened to the winning percentage of the aces? It went down of course! Pocket aces preflop are now only about 65% to win with a 0.25% chance of a split pot. The king before the flop has about 19% to win and the six is about 16%. So what happens if someone raises that 11% for travel? Aces now only have a 14% chance of winning.
Now let’s examine a 6-handed table. The percentages may surprise you. Pocket aces against the following hands are only 33% to win: king queen of spades (16% to win), seven two of different suits (8%), three of four of hearts (18%), jack ten of another suit (10%) and eight ten of the same suit of diamonds (13%). I’m sure those numbers don’t add up to 100%, everything is roughly rounded. Three four of the same suit is the surprising one. On the other hand, the aces do not share a suit with him, but the same applies to the king queen of the same suit, who has less chance of hitting. This has to do with the fact that three fours of the same suit can be both an ascending and descending straight draw (2-6 or 3-7 or even 4-8), while the odds of the ascending straight draw The occurrence for king queen has decreased due to two aces missing in the odds.
Imagine what happens if you add another 3 or four players for a full table. Those odds get even lower. You have to kick your opponents when you have pocket aces or you will most likely go broke. This is how the hand is played. Fewer players in the hand means better odds for you. Truth be told, you could have 72 out of suit and your odds of winning increase when you only have 1 opponent, especially when you figure in bluffing, table image, etc.
The problem with pocket aces, especially online, is when you raise a lot of players and they know you have something good and they want to break it. Online players know that aces are broken more often in online poker, so they are willing to give it a try. The reason behind this is simple, it is not a completely random shuffle as it is a computer program that tries to play randomly. Most people can’t do perfect shuffle, so imagine trying to get a computer program that understands only 1 and 0 (on off) as commands trying to do so. With so many variables coming into play, it would be very difficult to include all possible variables. People shuffle wrong, computers can’t be wrong, so the odds online are slightly different than at your local game. At home, the playing cards don’t usually go 1, 2, 1, 2, so yes, the odds vary from place to place. Sad but true. This does not change the fact that you must send off as many opponents as you can when you have aces. Even if the odds change 20% in your opponent’s favor due to a bad mix, you still have a better chance of beating one opponent than nine.