In this post, we are going to look at a few examples of some good lines to play post-flop with Ace-King when we miss the board. These can be some of the most awkward spots to learn how to play even for seasoned poker players, so let’s look at some examples…
Defending from the Blinds with Ace-King
So in this first hand, we are in the Big Blind for this example and our opponent has raised from late position (Cut-Off) so we have a couple of options… we could re-raise and build the pot, however, this will work against us in a few ways:
- We will give away the strength of our hand
- We will build the pot whilst being out of position for the rest of the hand
- We fold out some poor holdings which we might win a lot more from post-flop if we keep them in the hand
For these reasons I think it’s going to be much better to just flat call, this will disguise our hand strength and control the pot size giving us more manoeuvrability after the flop.
Post-Flop
When playing out of position we will want to have a lot of checks on boards like this one where we have a lot of equity against our opponent’s range of hands but betting doesn’t achieve much at all…
All better hands will continue and we should be looking to get to showdown with our overcards, gutshot to the nuts and backdoor nut flush draw.
So starting with a check is a good plan, we can mix in some check-raises as well as check calls depending on our opponent.
Playing with Ace-King (AK) in position
So we are going to have some times where we are playing AKs/AKo in position where we are going to want to isolate the pot and get it heads up against one opponent with our range advantage.
The perks of doing this are we get to play a bigger pot with our strong hand and we will have more equity in a heads up pot than we will in a multiway pot, so we will have a much better chance of winning the pot.
We don’t have to 3-Bet too big when playing in position somewhere between 2.5x-3.5x is fine, as we want to just 3-Bet enough to get the pot heads up whilst keeping in our opponent’s bad hands.
Post-Flop
So yet another swing and a miss with our Ace King, but how should we play this one with the betting lead in position when checked to by our opponent…
Well I prefer to keep betting on this type of board with our hand, we have a backdoor flush draw so we could hit a diamond on the turn and keep firing, we can also hit either one of our cards to make a strong top pair and continue.
Betting will also apply a lot of pressure to hands that currently have us beat like 22, 44, 55, 66 are all going to have a tough time wanting to continue on this board even to a single bet, hands as strong as 88–JJ will have a hard time continuing to a second barrell too.
We will also be protecting our equity against hands that call pre-flop but have now missed this board, hands like A5s, KJs, KTs, JTs, AJs, ATs will usually have to fold on this board facing just one bet, so we deny them their equity by closing them out with our continuation bet, or charge them to continue with their worse holdings.
Another perk of betting is that we are going to be able to see all five cards for a small bet size on the flop, as we can opt to check behind on the Turn and see the River when our opponent plays in flow on the Turn and checks to us again.
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