Can you fold ak preflop

No less a poker legend than TJ Cloutier, remarking about the old Texas road games of his earlier days, wrote that the second preflop raise meant a monster and the third raise was almost certainly A-A. There are players against whom calling with A-K pre-flop is not only a good play, but calling all the way down with the hand against a three-bullet bluff is profitable as well.

Only with experience, however, will the new player recognize such a situation. The problem with A-K is that it just looks so good. I haven't. I may even be in the red overall lol. But I do have 10 plus years under my belt and if experience has taught me anything, it's that the mathematics don't always equate to positive results.

Thanks by the way for the free cheat sheet. I'll be reading it. How the Pros Play AK. This is why it is extremely important to be using a good poker HUD these days especially if you play online poker. Against a loose and aggressive player who is capable of making lots of bluffs I will be much more likely to go all-in with AK than versus a tight disciplined player. Also, the board texture plays a big role as well.

For Example: Consider these two different flops. Well, I hope you said the 2nd one because that is the correct answer. There are no possible straights for example. Two pair hands are also less likely on this board. A lot of people will fold A7 or A2 preflop for instance. Also, another crucial difference is that the 2nd flop has a possible flush draw while the 1st one does not.

This means that our opponent can be overplaying a draw as well. The bottom line is that you need to be very careful about going all in with AK on the flop, turn or river. Most of the time in a single raised pot which means there was just a raise and a call preflop , you should not be willing to go all in. It is better to just call instead with your AK, control the size of the pot, and try to get to a relatively cheap showdown. Always be aware of the player type though and the board texture.

These factors should also play a big role in your decision making. I discuss when to go all-in with AK in much more detail in my best selling poker book Crushing the Microstakes.

How about the pros though? How do they play their Ace King? And this is because I would rather keep the pot size smaller and exercise my postflop skill advantage. This is something that Daniel Negreanu discusses in his new poker training course. Daniel for example has long advocated a style of play that he calls "small ball. I tend to agree with this strategy and use it a lot myself especially in small stakes games where I know that I have a large skill advantage on the flop, turn and river.

So in many cases I will choose to just call a re-raise before the flop and see a flop instead of putting in the re-raise 4bet and essentially just playing a game of chicken with them. This is because I know I have a large edge after the flop. I feel confident that I can win more pots than most of my opponents after the flop whether I hit my ace or king or not. This is how most professional poker players play their AK especially when they are playing against weaker amateur poker players. They would rather control the size of the pot than just blindly go all-in with ace king and hope that their opponent doesn't wake up with a really strong hand.

To solve this, we actually just need two things. Then we also need any sort of equity calculator. Download my free EV spreadsheet here. The equity we can figure out using a program like Equilab. So we already have our AKs in here. We just go into the spreadsheet, put that in, and we see exactly what this is worth. So to the question of can we ever fold AK preflop? It is mathematically correct to fold your AK preflop in this scenario. So using the same, exact tools, we have the exact, same numbers here in terms of how big the pot is, how much we have to call.