Some starting hands are easier to play in No Limit Hold’em than others. There are hands that you can handle easily, and there are hands that are difficult for you to handle. Also, in between these two categories, there is a wide range of hands that don’t seem to be so easy and often cause problems for players. That’s what we’re going to talk about today.
In this article, we’ll look at five starting hands that many players make mistakes with, as well as talk about the reasons for these mistakes and how to avoid them in the future.
Ace (AQ)
Despite being one of the best starting hands in poker, many players make costly mistakes with it. Specifically, this is because people often overvalue this hand in certain situations and risk severely overpaying their opponent with their second best hand.
Also, no matter how strong AQs are, they still lose to the most expensive brands:
- AQs vs AA : 13% equity
- AQs vs KK : 32% equity
- AQs vs QQ : 34% equity
- AQs vs JJ : 46% equity
- AQs vs AK : 30% equity
As you can see, AQs are very bad against all these hands except JJ and the rest of the pairs below.
Undoubtedly, it’s a great tool to dominate, especially against all the others, and you should have a good winrate in the long run (check your base). However, the problem is that if you overvalue AQ, you can often dodge good spots while losing big pots in bad ones.
As mentioned above, the second best hand in poker is the worst.
That’s exactly the problem with this kind of hand. It’s too strong to throw, but can often cause more problems than good.
This is especially true when there is extremely aggressive action going on preflop.
Since you can expect weak calls from a lot of hands, AQ is a strong hand, and most of the time you should play the pot aggressively (with open raises and 3-bets). However, you should already be more careful in case you get three-betting yourself.
Since you are unlikely to get weaker action from the hand, 4-betting with AQ is probably not the best choice.