Pocket Aces And Limping In

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As long as I’ve been writing about poker, I have heard two questions asked again and again. First, is pocket aces really the best hand? Or are some other hands better? And second, should you limp into the pot sometimes, or should you always raise? I’d like to put these questions to rest in today’s column.

Someone recently wrote me the following:

The other night I was playing a live game in a casino and another player said he preferred 7-6 suited to pocket aces. He said he had lost thousands with aces but had won loads with 7-6 suited. I countered by suggesting [that] he wasn’t taking notes [so] he couldn’t produce any evidence to prove his assertion.

Another friend of mine insists that “the pros say jack ten is a better hand than aces.” I strongly disagree with him, but he is completely adamant about it. I understand than in really deep-stacked games a player who plays aces really badly (by tipping the strength of his hand preflop and then refusing to release it post flop) could lose money with aces against a good player who has position with J-T. But won’t this bad player also lose with J-T? What do you think?

While I suppose that it’s theoretically possible for someone to play pocket aces so badly that they actually perform better with J-T suited (presumably because they’re far less likely to do something horrendously stupid with J-T suited), in practice I would highly doubt that any such player exists anywhere in the world.

And even if such a player were to exist, they would have to play almost exclusively in extremely deep-stacked live games (500 big blind stacks and deeper) to perform the feat of actually performing worse with pocket aces than with J-T suited.

Anyone who uses tracking software and who has more than a few hundred hands of online no-limit in their database will see that J-T suited is certainly not better than A-A. Indeed, I would be surprised to see any decent-sized sample of hands (say a month’s worth of regular play) where A-A did not place first in winnings. It is by far the most profitable hand.

So my verdict is that my reader’s friends who think suited connectors perform better than pocket aces are misinformed.

But I’ve noticed that live game players often do tend to play aces (in particular) very badly. An obvious way to misplay aces is to hold on to them too long in the face of overwhelming evidence that they’re no good. But I actually don’t see that mistake as often as I see a different one.

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