If youâve ever been asked the perennial poker question: âWhatâs your favorite hand?â then youâll have answered one of two ways. Firstly, and correctly, youâll have said âpocket acesâ and secondly youâll have wrongly said any other hand. Thatâs because aces are the best pre-flop hand in the game of poker.
How often are you going to be dealt pocket aces, however, and what are their odds of winning a random hand? What about being dealt pocket aces twice in a row?
What are the Odds of Being Dealt Aces?
The easiest way to summarize exactly what the chances are of picking up pocket aces is to calculate each card independently of the other at the point of the deal taking place. There are 52 cards in a deck and four aces among them. That means your chances of getting an ace as your first card are one in 13. Lucky for some.
The chances of picking up an ace as your second card are 3/51, or to reduce that number, one in 17. Combining those odds is really as simple as multiplying them, meaning that the chances of you being dealt pocket aces – or indeed any pocket pair – are one in 221.
All that means that if youâre in a room with 221 nine-handed tables (1,989 players), then every single deal, someone in the room will have aces if you work out the average.
What are the Odds of Being Dealt Pocket Aces Twice in a Row?
Itâs like waiting for a bus, isnât it? You play online, multi-tabling like crazy and you feel like you havenât seen pocket aces for ages. Then, all of a sudden, they arrive. Whether you win the hand or not is something weâll come back to later, but in the very next hand, letâs say that you receive pocket aces again. Magic… or predictable?
The true odds of receiving pocket aces in two consecutive deals are actually very high. With six combinations out of 1,326 meaning youâre a one in 221 chance to receive the âpocket rocketsâ off the bat, to do so twice in a row means we multiply that number to the power of two.
That means weâre a one in 48,841 shot to be dealt aces in back-to-back hands. If it happens, for goodness sake try to win with them. Thatâs easier said than done, of course, with pocket kings still only a 4:1 dog in probability terms, but you should always want to receive the rockets and deal with how to turn them into profit chips-wise after doing so.
What About Two Players Both Receiving Aces?
Weâve seen it happen in recent years, of course. Back in 2014, Connor Drinan and Cary Katz both received aces in the $1 million-entry Big One for One Drop. Of all tournaments, it was the sickest one in the world to get all-in with pocket aces… and lose to pocket aces. Thatâs what Drinan managed, however, as Katz made a flush with one of his and dashed Drinan’s dreams. Poker commentry legend Lon McEachern described the hand as âthe worst beat in the history of tournament pokerâ, but was he right?
Letâs look at the odds of two players out of a ten-handed table both receiving pocket aces from the dealer. The chances of that happening are extremely rare, but not nearly as exceptional as one player receiving them in back-to-back deals. The actual probability of two players at a ten-handed table both being dealt aces are one in 6,016.
Finally, what are your chances of winning with pocket aces? Here weâre not just in grey territory, weâre living in the shadows with Batman. All told, the chances of winning against every other hand, assuming all of your nine opponents went to the river would be just 31.36%.
Yes, thatâs right, more than twice in three hands, if everyone checks to the river, you should lose with pocket aces.
Itâs not just us, then.
