// matchups · pair vs two overcards

AKo vs 22 ace-king offsuit against pocket twos

All-in before the flop, ace-king offsuit wins 47.0% of boards, pocket twos wins 52.3%, and 0.6% split the pot. 22 is a 1.11 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 4 ways the suits can line up, and the working is below.

AKo47.35%equity · wins 47.04%
2252.65%equity · wins 52.34%

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 two overcards

The race people call a coin flip. The pair is ahead now and stays ahead unless the board pairs one of the two higher cards or makes a straight or flush for them. It is close, but it is rarely exactly 50/50, and which side is favoured depends on how much straight and flush potential the unpaired hand has.

Suits change it by 0.78 points

There are 72 ways to deal AKo against 22 without the two hands sharing a card, and they fall into 4 patterns once you ignore which suit is which. Best case for AKo is 47.74% (for example A♣K♦ against 2♣2♦), worst is 46.96% (A♣K♦ against 2♥2♠). The headline number is the average over all 72, weighted by how many deals share each pattern.

Example dealSuits in commonDeals like itAKo winsSplit22 winsAKo equity
A♣K♦ vs 2♣2♦A–2, K–212 of 72811,89911,179889,22647.74%
A♣K♦ vs 2♣2♥A–224 of 72805,52910,559896,21647.35%
A♣K♦ vs 2♦2♥K–224 of 72805,48910,566896,24947.35%
A♣K♦ vs 2♥2♠none12 of 72799,1199,946903,23946.96%

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. AKo wins most often with two pair (20.2% of boards); 22 with two pair (17.7%). Splits happen when both hands play the same five cards or make the same hand, mostly straights.

Made handAKo wins with it22 wins with itSplit with it
Pair17.06%12.58%–
Two pair20.22%17.70%–
Three of a kind2.60%11.51%–
Straight2.99%0.81%0.37%
Flush1.72%1.03%0.12%
Full house2.29%7.82%0.13%
Four of a kind0.14%0.89%0.00%
Straight flush0.01%0.01%0.00%
Total47.04%52.34%0.62%

When calling with AKo is right

If you call an all-in of S with AKo and know you are up against exactly 22, you win 47.35% of a pot that holds 2S plus whatever dead money D was already in the middle (blinds, antes, earlier bets). Calling breaks even when 47.35% × (2S + D) = S, so D ÷ S = 1 ÷ 0.4735 − 2 = 0.112. A 10 bb shove needs at least 1.1 bb of dead money before calling it with AKo 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: AKo (dealt as A♣K♦, the most common suit pattern) facing a 10 bb all-in with 2.5 bb already in the middle, against a range of exactly 22. 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 AKo or 22

Other matchups with AKo or 22
MatchupFirst handSplitSecond handEquity bar
AKo vs QQ43.2%0.4%56.8%
AKo vs JJ43.1%0.4%56.9%
AKo vs TT43.1%0.4%56.9%
AKo vs 9944.7%0.4%55.3%
AKo vs 8844.8%0.4%55.2%
AKo vs 5545.4%0.5%54.6%
AKs vs 2249.9%0.6%50.1%
JTs vs 2253.8%1.4%46.2%

Other pair vs two overcards matchups

Other pair vs two overcards matchups
MatchupFirst handSplitSecond handEquity bar
AKs vs QQ46.0%0.4%54.0%
AKs vs JJ46.0%0.4%54.0%
AQo vs JJ43.1%0.4%56.9%
AQs vs JJ45.9%0.4%54.1%
AQo vs TT43.1%0.4%56.9%
AJo vs TT43.0%0.4%57.0%
// 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 72 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 AKo at 47.71% here, 0.36 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: ako-vs-22.json and the summary matchups.json, built by tools/build-matchups.mjs.