The Most Challenging Hole Cards

Just as we all have favourite hands which we know well how to play, and hands we can discard without much thought, poker has a nasty habit of giving us difficult hands and difficult spots that pull us i both directions.

Let’s take a look at some of the most challenging hands we can receive, and how best to play them.

The top of the list has to be…

AK suited!

The biggest hand without actually being a hand, Big Slick of the suited variety is incredibly awkward to play – unless you simply decide to either shove them every time pre-flop or conversely muck them to avoid any problems!

Naturally, neither of these plays is very good long-term – you’re just throwing away the equity a strong hand which is well-played should bring you.

So, we are playing them – but how do we maximise their potential, and what should we be watching out for?

Well, the first thing to note is that although the suited version is only about 2% better than having the unsuited version, it is much harder to let go of, particularly if the flop comes with flush draw possibilities! Mucking the unsuited version to a raise on such a flop is easy, suited much less so.

Pre-flop we are generally open-raising with AKs, and 3-betting any raise before us. 4-betting and stacking off depends very much on how you view your opponent. However, in position we might be better off just calling a percentage of our AKs and using that position to outplay people post-flop.

The tricky part pre-flop is knowing how far to push our hand. Online you might find stacking off pre-flop is a generally good, even necessary depending on the structure - strategy in tournaments, less so in cash games at low-to-mid stakes– but in live casinos you might find a more varied approach to the hand works well.

Post-flop? Tricky unless you have completely hit your hand. Often you’ll have 2 overcards to the board and nothing else. Perhaps a back-door flush draw to go with it.

The real problem is that you don’t know if you are up against a big pair, or a made set, or a lesser 2 overcards – so post-flop you have to take great care not to be sucked into a betting war when you are left holding a draw and your dick in your hand and not much else!

Conclusion: Play AKs strongly pre-flop most of the time, particularly in tournaments and online, but don’t be scared to let it go if the pot gets too big – even top pair, top kicker will often lose so don’t get too attached to the pretty Anna Kournikova of poker!

A pair of Jacks

Next up are the ‘fish-hooks’ – JJ – which are the most horrible of the big pairs to play. Much of what follows applies to QQ also, but naturally the ladies are a bit stronger and can survive a bit better when things are tough.

The main problem here is that pre-flop, any raising war will likely see you up against the bigger pairs or biggest Ax hands – so you’re either a big dog or a very slight favourite.

Of course, you still have to play them somehow, but the trick is to not go bust with such hands! With most flops containing at least one overcard to your jacks, you’ll never be quite sure where you stand – so tread warily.

More often than not, you will raise this hand pre-flop – it is after all a good hand - but you need to control the pot size, keeping it relatively small.

To do this, you need to check and call more often during a hand than you would with bigger pairs -betting and raising at every opportunity is not a great strategy for JJ!

Of course, as with all the hands we will look at here, every hand is ‘situational’ – games and tables vary; stack-sizes and tournament or table position are very important, and there are umpteen other criteria at play. Nonetheless, for the fish-hooks we need to be cautious in general.

Ace - Jack

Some hands are only challenging in poker because they are actually bad, others gain the title because they ‘could’ be good sometimes but are so overplayed that they cost people an awful lot of chips and money!

Ace-Jack fits the bill for the latter, because although it’s obviously a pretty good hand (and it also looks pretty, as all face card combinations do) it is also so easy to push it beyond its real value.

It’s not strong enough to be pushing with it pre-flop very often, and post-flop what are you hoping for? Top pair/top kicker? Probably, as straights are unlikely – flopped aces could spell trouble to a bigger (or even smaller) Ax – and then how do you proceed with tptk?

AJ is really a hand for winning some small pots and also for later stages in tournaments or perhaps short-handed play. It’s goo – just not good enough to bet your stack on, which unfortunately most databases will show is exactly what players do with it!

Small Pocket Pairs

Any pair is an appealing thing to look down at when the deal plays out – there is always that little surge of adrenalin which accompanies them. However, in poker, size is important, and the smaller your pair – the less use it is to you!

We can class these challenging hands as anything from 22 up to 77, when their only real value is set mining or perhaps a little show-down value on less scary boards. We all know that we can stack people off when we do hit our set on the flop, but we also have to realise that we won’t do it very often. This leads to the correct way to play such hands; cheaply and quickly!

You need to be aware of the maths behind such hands ( you’ll only hit your set on the flop roughly one time in eight) and therefore you need any opponent you are hoping to take to the cleaners to have a decent stack. If you can’t get paid off, there’s little point in playing them at all.

A ratio of about 20:1 of stack versus bet is a decent figure to work with – less than this and you’re likely to be pissing away small bets too often by calling pre- or post-flop with your little guys.

Remember, even when we improve at poker a lot we will find ourselves facing challenging and difficult decisions every day. Almost nothing is set in stone on poker, and the hands above can make you a lot of money if you cut out the silly plays and develop the good strategies for playing them.

If anyone has a favourite ‘difficult’ hand, please post it in the comments below!