Poker Judgment

DO YOU PASS THE ACE-QUEEN TEST

What do you do with when someone ahead of you has raised in an early or early middle position before the flop? Do you always play it, usually by calling the two bets cold? Then get into my game please. Most of the time, playing AQ this way is, in my opinion, just one more sign of an unschooled player who is going to be mediocre at best in his overcall play.

To see why this is so, consider Sklansky’s well known hand groups. Which groups comprise the spectrum of hands a solid player will typically raise with from early and early-middle positions? Of course it depends on the situation (including whether or not anyone has limped in yet, the kinds of players behind him, his current image, and more), but here is a rough, general answer: From an early position he is going to raise with Groups one and Two, and sometimes Group Three. From an early-middle position he will raise with Groups one through Three, and sometimes with certain Group Four hands. Now where does AQ fall in this spectrum? It’s at the end of Group Three. That’s near the bottom of the list of poker hands a decent player is going to raise with. Thus, if you call his raise with AQ you are calling with a hand that falls well below the average hand he will be holding. You might reasonably argue that AQ should actually fair quite well against the other Group Three hands and a couple of the Group Two hands.

But that is only clearly true when the pot is not going to be multiway. Here I am addressing the full range of preflop situations. (Even if you were to juggle hands around in the groups to reflect only their heads-up values for example, promoting AQ to the end of Group Two, and demoting KQs to Group. Three then counting card combinations in Groups one through Three, the AQ is clearly superior to only about 28 percent of the hand combinations that it would go up against ).Even more important is the fact that many good players raise with most of the Group Three hands only a minority of the time in earlier positions.

Clearly, you are a big dog holding AQ when a solid poker player raises in this situation. Note too that many mediocre and weaker players have similar or even tighter raising standards. This does not mean that AQ is never playable against a raise. Sometime it is. Among the factors which bear on your decision are your position and that of your opponent, his likelihood of being on a steal or semi-steal, his raising standards, and your opponent’s skill level. It is clear, however that under routine conditions AQ should be folded when it is two bets to you before the flop. There are lots of ways of making a quick assessment of an unfamiliar player’s skill and knowledge of the game. Looking at how he handles AQ when faced with a raise is not a bad little test.

Playing Too Many Hands-I / Playing Too Many Hands-II
Bad Plays Good Players make / Self-Weighting Cold Calls
Do You Pass the Ace-Queen Test /

Conjecture on the Limits of Tell Detectability
Quick Indicators / Afterthought