Poker News

Sam Mudaro: Omaha Guru

Today I have the opportunity to answerer a question from a reader who writes “have played unsuited aces so many times and lost–what are the odds with various hands–please reply and could improve my game immensely if I knew what to fold”.

As I am nota mathematician I do not calculate odds. Instead I use and prefer to work with win percentage and net dollars won. To answer this question I queried my database of starting hands. It returned 391 hands that contain two or more Aces. Now before I receive a dozen or more letters from all the math experts telling me there are more starting hands than 391, let me explain how I count. As-Ah-Xd- Xh would be identical to Ac- Ah-Xd-Xh and counted as one hand. There are 91 non-suited hands and 300 suited hands. Of the 391 totals hands only 27 are non-profitable, 9 of the suited variety and 18 non-suited.

The suited losers consist of 7 trip aces, namely 3 aces with a 7 through a king. The other 2 hands are back suited pairs with a 9 combined with a K and Q.

Looking at the 18 non profitable, non-suited A-A combinations there is 1 four of a kind, 3 sets ranging from 3 aces with a 5 through K, one 2 pair with the infamous 9-9 and 7 hands consisting of just a pair of nonsuited aces.

When you have a set of aces and one is suited to the fourth card, you need a 6 or less to be profitable. The same handin the non-suited version requires a more restrictive 2, 3 or 4 to be profitable.

Now that we examined the losers I will present the complete list of profitable hands containing non-suited aces.

There are 73 profitable hands containing a pair of non-suited aces that are profitable. Of the 73 hands, 3 of them contain a set of aces, 11 consist of 2 pair with the 59 remaining consisting of just the single pair. The most profitable is the A-A-2-3 with a net win on average of $33.47. Let’s see if we can come up with a way of organizing the chart to facilitate committing it to memory.

With trip aces we need a 4 or less. We can play any two pair except with a pair of 9’s. We all know the 9 is the worst card to hold. Even a pair of aces, the most profitable pair you can hold, is not profitable when combined with a pair of nines.

Summarizing is not so simple when we get to the single pairs. If we look at the hands 3 cards at a time we can then say: A-A-2 non-suited is playable with any fourth card. The same is true with A-A-3, A-A-4 and all the way through A-A-7. We may then say, with one rule, that A-A non-suited is playable with any two cards whether the other two cards are paired or not as long as one is less than or equal to a 7. That will account for 59 out of the 73 playable hands. That constitutes an amazing 82%. If we now eliminate the 9 from hands beginning with A-A-8, the rest are playable. If we carry this one step further and eliminate the 9 from all the hands left out of the first rule, then all other hands are playable except for the trips. It is therefore possible to state with 2 rules, one simple and one complicated that will cover all playable hands containing a nonsuited pair of aces.

So what have we learned? Indeed you can profitably play the non-suited pair of aces. Just follow these two rules. Only play sets that contain a 4 or less. Play any A-A-x-x non-suited combination where both cards are less then or equal to a 7 and any other combination with an 8 or higher as long as one of them is not a 9. Next time we will continue with post flop play.

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