// matchups · pair blocks a card

AA vs A5s pocket aces against ace-five suited

All-in before the flop, pocket aces wins 86.1% of boards, ace-five suited wins 12.7%, and 1.3% split the pot. AA is a 6.51 to 1 favourite. These are not samples: the engine dealt every one of the 1,712,304 possible five-card boards for each of the 1 ways the suits can line up, and the working is below.

AA86.69%equity · wins 86.06%
A5s13.31%equity · wins 12.67%

Equity counts a split pot as half a win for each side, which is why the two equities add to 100% and the two win rates do not.

A pair against a hand holding one of its rank

The pair holds two of the four cards of the rank the other hand shares, so pairing that card is close to impossible and would only give it trips against a set. The underdog mostly needs to pair its other card while the pair does not improve.

Suits do not change it

There are 12 ways to deal AA against A5s without the two hands sharing a card, and they fall into 1 pattern once you ignore which suit is which. Every deal is the same problem with the suits relabelled, so there is only one number.

Example dealSuits in commonDeals like itAA winsSplitA5s winsAA equity
A♣A♦ vs A♥5♥none12 of 121,473,53721,824216,94386.69%

Click any deal to run it in the equity calculator, which counts the same boards in your browser, or add a third hand, a flop or a dead card to it.

How each hand wins

The made hand the winner shows down with, as a share of all boards. AA wins most often with two pair (37.7% of boards); A5s with flush (6.9%). Splits happen when both hands play the same five cards or make the same hand, mostly straights.

Made handAA wins with itA5s wins with itSplit with it
Pair34.00%0.00%–
Two pair37.70%0.00%–
Three of a kind6.24%1.77%–
Straight0.00%3.39%1.17%
Flush2.16%6.92%0.07%
Full house5.95%0.46%–
Four of a kind0.00%0.06%0.03%
Straight flush0.01%0.07%0.00%
Total86.06%12.67%1.27%

When calling with A5s is right

If you call an all-in of S with A5s and know you are up against exactly AA, you win 13.31% of a pot that holds 2S plus whatever dead money D was already in the middle (blinds, antes, earlier bets). Calling breaks even when 13.31% × (2S + D) = S, so D ÷ S = 1 ÷ 0.1331 − 2 = 5.515. A 10 bb shove needs at least 55.1 bb of dead money before calling it with A5s stops losing chips. Nobody shows you their hand, though: against a real shove you are calling a range, and the push/fold charts already account for it.

Open this as a spot: A5s (dealt as A♥5♥, the most common suit pattern) facing a 10 bb all-in with 2.5 bb already in the middle, against a range of exactly AA. The calculator samples runouts rather than dealing all of them, so expect its equity to land within a few tenths of a point of the exact figure for that deal. Change the pot, the bet or the range and it reprices.

Each hand has its own page with its equity against all 169 starting hands and its push/fold range at every stack depth.

More with AA or A5s

Other matchups with AA or A5s
MatchupFirst handSplitSecond handEquity bar
AA vs KK81.9%0.5%18.1%
AA vs QQ81.5%0.4%18.5%
AA vs JJ81.1%0.4%18.9%
AA vs 2282.2%0.5%17.8%
AA vs AKo93.2%1.3%6.8%
AA vs AKs87.9%1.3%12.1%
66 vs A5s65.6%0.5%34.4%
AA vs KQs82.9%0.4%17.1%

Other pair blocks a card matchups

Other pair blocks a card matchups
MatchupFirst handSplitSecond handEquity bar
KK vs AKo69.9%0.8%30.1%
KK vs AKs65.9%0.8%34.1%
QQ vs AQo69.7%1.3%30.3%
QQ vs AQs65.7%1.2%34.3%
JJ vs AJo69.4%1.7%30.6%
TT vs ATs65.2%2.1%34.8%
// how these numbers were computed
  • Exhaustive, not sampled. With four cards dealt, 48 remain, and there are C(48, 5) = 1,712,304 five-card boards. For each suit pattern our Rust engine (the same WebAssembly file the trainer runs) evaluated both seven-card hands on every board and counted wins, splits and losses. The board counts in the suit table are exact; anyone with an enumerator can reproduce them digit for digit.
  • Suit patterns. Two deals are the same pattern when one becomes the other by renaming suits (clubs to hearts, say), which cannot change who wins. Each pattern is enumerated once and weighted by how many of the 12 deals it stands for.
  • Cross-check. The site's independent Monte Carlo matrix (200,000 random boards per matchup, used on the starting-hand pages) has AA at 86.66% here, 0.03 points from the exact figure. The build fails if any matchup disagrees by more than 0.4 points.
  • All-in preflop only. This is the equity when the money goes in before the flop and five cards are dealt with no more decisions. It says nothing about how the hands play when there is betting left.
  • Raw data: aa-vs-a5s.json and the summary matchups.json, built by tools/build-matchups.mjs.