AA vs 72o: Best Hand Against the Worst, 88/12

Pocket aces beat 7-2 offsuit about 88% of the time when the money goes in before the flop. That is the widest gap between any two starting hands in Hold'em: the best hand in the deck against the worst. The best situation poker can hand you still loses one pot in eight.

The number, and why it is not bigger

All in preflop, aces take roughly 88% and the deuce-seven takes the other 12%, with a sliver going to split pots.

Most players expect a wider gap. Best against worst sounds like it should be 95/5. It is not, because 7-2 offsuit still keeps both cards and sees five more, and any two live cards drag equity out of a made hand.

Here is how that 88% compares against the rest of the field:

Aces against	AA equity
AKo	~92%
72o	~88%
AKs	~88%
KK	~82%
22	~81%
JTs	~77%

Two things jump out. Aces do no better against the worst hand in poker than against A♠K♠: the straight and flush potential in suited big cards is worth as much as the high-card strength 7-2 lacks. And aces peak against a hand holding the last ace, because half of it is already dead.

Why 7-2 offsuit is the worst hand

Starting-hand value comes from three places: high-card strength, the ability to make a straight, and the ability to make a flush. 7-2 offsuit is the hand that scores zero on all three.

• It cannot make a straight with both cards. A seven and a deuce are too far apart to sit in the same five-card run, so any straight it makes is available to everybody else too.
• It cannot make a flush with both cards. Offsuit removes the other half of the drawing value.
• Its pairs are worthless. Pairing the seven loses to any bigger pair, and the deuce kicker never plays.
• It has nothing to bluff-catch with. When the board bricks you hold seven high, which beats nothing that bets.

Change one thing and the hand improves sharply. 7-2 suited picks up a flush draw and several points of equity against aces, and 3-2 offsuit is barely worse off despite being lower, because the deuce and trey can both appear in a wheel.

Where the 12% actually comes from

7-2 does not creep up on aces. It cannot make its own straight or flush, so almost every hand it wins is a two pair, trips or a full house that arrives on the flop.

The uglier version is 7-7-x or 2-2-x, where trips leaves you needing one of the two remaining aces to make a bigger full house. Both flops are rare. Neither is rare enough to never happen to you.

One time in eight arrives more often than it sounds

Eight feels like a lot until you multiply. Win an 88% shot five times running and you are barely better than a coin flip to have swept them: 0.88 multiplied by itself five times is about 53%. Stretch it to six and one of them usually gets away.

The money still says shove every time. At $1/$2 with $200 effective stacks, an 88% favourite wins $200 seven times in eight and loses $200 once, worth about $152 each time.

It also means you hand over a full stack with some regularity for doing everything right, which is what counts as a bad beat in the only sense that matters: a hand with no mistake in it that you lost anyway.

Extra opponents cost more than bad cards

The single biggest threat to aces is not the quality of the hand against you. It is the number of hands against you.

Heads-up against a random holding, aces sit around 85%. Against three random hands they drop to roughly 64%, and in a nine-way all-in they are under 40% — still the strongest hand dealt, still a favourite to lose the pot.

Put the spot into a poker equity calculator and step through it: aces against one random hand, then three, then eight. That curve is why a limped six-way pot with A♣A♦ is a worse spot than a heads-up all-in against 7-2.

Playing aces so the 12% costs less

You cannot stop 7-2 from flopping two pair. You can make sure it rarely gets to see a flop for free, and that it pays when it does.

• Raise, then raise again. Every preflop bet either wins the pot outright or charges a hand that has no business being there.
• Cut the field. Three-betting an opener folds out most of the trash behind, which does more for your aces than any postflop skill.
• Do not slowplay to trap the worst hands. Trapping works on hands strong enough to pay you off. 7-2 needs a free flop to be worth anything at all.

The full treatment of sizing, position and the awkward postflop spots is in how to play pocket aces. The genuinely difficult matchup, though, is not the deuce-seven — it is aces against pocket kings, where the gap narrows to 82/18 and both players are happy to put their stack in.

When the 12% turns up

You are dealt aces about once every 221 hands. Play a few hundred thousand and you will lose them to 7-2 offsuit more than once, with money on the line and someone at the table calling it a read.

Record nothing about the hand except that you played it right. An 88% favourite that loses is not evidence about your game or the site's dealing — it is the twelve per cent turning up at its normal rate. If it still stings, why variance feels unfair covers the maths behind the feeling.

The best hand against the worst is a bet you take a thousand times without blinking, and lose roughly one hundred and twenty of them. Both halves of that sentence are the same fact.