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While playing at the Tropicana in Atlantic City earlier
this year, one of the older players at my 1-2 no-limit hold’em table
lamented how much times have changed. He noted that fixed-limit poker used
to be the first stop for new players because at beginners’ limits it’s very
difficult to go broke right away, even with very little knowledge of the
game. The thought of beginning with no-limit poker was considered frivolous
at best, and downright foolish at worst, because a bad no-limit player would
lose his bankroll as quickly as the cards can be dealt to him. There are
just too many trouble hands in no-limit that get a player in deep trouble of
the sort he wouldn’t experience if he were in a fixed-limit game.
This older gentleman was troubled by the fact that new poker players today
skip straight to no-limit hold’em because that’s what they’ve seen on
television. Unless he was some sort of altruistic soul looking to help the
young newcomers play better poker – a possibility I don’t discount
completely, but one which I find highly unlikely - he should have been happy
about this trend. With so many bad no-limit players around, it’s a sure bet
that some of them will actually end up winning money from the other bad
players and eventually be seated at your table. These players are poker’s
equivalent of a vein of gold waiting for a miner. The most important thing
you can do to make sure you get in on this gold rush is to stay patient and
be aware of situations where you can get yourself (and your bankroll) into
deep trouble by overplaying your hands.
One of the most notable trouble hands around is A-Q. No less an authority than
Doyle Brunson, perhaps the greatest living no-limit hold’em player, famously
declared in Super System that he simply wouldn’t play the hand. Doyle is a
poker player, so that statement has to be taken with a grain of salt, but
there is good reason why he would say such a thing. Much like A-J, A-Q
simply looks far prettier than it is. Taking a look at the percentages
exposes A-Q for the trouble hand it really is. To be fair to A-Q, the first
situation to examine is the best-case scenario: when it has the opposing
hand dominated. The hands that find themselves in a dominated position – A-J
and below, K-Q, and Q-J and below – are a combined 73.5-26.5 underdog
against A-Q. That’s roughly 2.77:1 – pretty good odds. When A-Q is up
against a random hand, the odds change a bit. It now finds itself only a
64.9-35.1 favorite, roughly 1.85:1. Those are still decent odds, but it’s a
big drop from the odds A-Q enjoys against dominated hands.
While it’s good to know the favorable situations A-Q can end up in, the
worst-case scenarios with A-Q are what should really concern us. Beginning
players tend to play A-Q very strongly, raising with it from almost any
position because it looks so good. While they’ll get lucky now and then and
find someone who will play back at them with random or dominated hands, the
majority of their wins will be small pots. Their losses, however, will
frequently be of the entire-stack variety due to the fact that the only
hands strong enough to play back at A-Q are heavy favorites. A-A, Q-Q, and
A-K are a combined 75.8-24.2 favorite against A-Q – that’s 3.12:1. K-K, the
other monster hand that A-Q will frequently find challenging it, is a
70.9-29.1 favorite. At 2:44:1, that’s weaker than the hands that dominate
A-Q, but still almost as favorable as A-Q against hands it dominates. Even
against smaller pairs that some might play aggressively, A-Q still finds
itself a 54-46 underdog. 1.17:1 isn’t a horrible situation to find yourself
in, especially if you are desperate, but the fact is that you still lose
more than you win.
Because of its weaknesses, the most important thing to keep in mind with A-Q
is position. Position can eliminate many of the holes in a starting hand.
When you play A-Q aggressively in early position, you’re begging for one of
the seven to ten players left to act behind you to wake up with one of the
hands that crushes A-Q and move you all-in. Middle and late position make
A-Q slightly stronger, as fewer players can potentially wake up with big
hands. Even in these most favorable situations, though, the pots you take
will be small because the chances of someone playing back at you for their
entire stack with a dominated hand are very small. The best advice is not to
play A-Q aggressively at all, but if you have to do so late position is
where you want to attack.
At the same Tropicana table where the older gentleman wished younger players
would start off with fixed-limit poker, I found myself seated to the left of
a highly aggressive younger player. He picked up lots of small pots with
aggressive betting after the flop, but he never did win a big pot. When he
finally played a hand heads-up with me, it ended up being for all of his
money on a queen-high flop. He held top pair, top kicker with A-Q under the
gun – and I held Q-Q on his immediate left. He played a lot of hands at that
table and had nothing to show for them when he walked away. I played a
relatively small number of hands in that short session and walked away with
double my starting stack. If he’d known his trouble hands better, he might
have gotten away from the hand. But when the turn brought an ace and gave
him two pair, he was going broke with A-Q.
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