My "Sklansky-ish" thoughts on the AK limp/raise/min.raise debate

[coltrane]

Here's one way of thinking about it:
if we all agree that we're not going broke to it automatically if we flop an ace or a king (meaning we can adequately play the TPTK hand from the flop on), AK can be thought of like this.....

everyone else has either a pair or unpaired cards....if someone has AA or KK, we're gonna find out about that one way or another but we'll assume again that we're good enough to play that situation correctly.....but other than that, against any other pair our AK is a slight dog - in which case I would think that we'd want 2 to 1 on our money one way or another (those are the odds of flopping top pair) - effective or implied odds.....if an ace or king flops, we play the hand accordingly keeping in mind that with our TPTK we are a favorite over any pocket pair that has not flopped a set....we got full value from the hand...

against any unpaired cards, the only thing we're worried about (if we flop an A or K) is someone flopping two pair, trips, or a straight (and those and the draws we'll have to play against accordingly)....but, all of those things are longshots to be ahead of us on the flop if we hit an ace or a king.....so by raising with AK, even if it's the minimum, they're making a mathematical mistake by calling and in the long run we'll be ahead (again, assuming we can play the hand from the flop on).....

so technically, even though everyone says to raise pre-flop with AK to isolate, you'd really rather the whole table call your raise (with poor odds to do so) - in the long run it has a higher EV......and I don't really think this is limited to limit hold'em, because especially from the flop on, a good player will make more money in NL because of being able to distort odds accordingly with their bets....

but that still means that it's clearly a negative EV play for a good player to limp with AK (and unnecessarily give infinite odds to the blinds) and that even a min. raise is a huge difference in EV.....

-Sunny