AKs vs AQs ace-king suited against ace-queen suited
All-in before the flop, ace-king suited wins 69.2% of boards, ace-queen suited wins 26.6%, and 4.2% split the pot. AKs is a 2.48 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.
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.
Two hands sharing a card: domination
When both hands hold the same rank, pairing it helps both of them and the other card decides it. The dominated hand needs its lower card to pair, so it wins far less often than two unrelated cards would.
Suits do not change it
There are 12 ways to deal AKs against AQs 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 deal | Suits in common | Deals like it | AKs wins | Split | AQs wins | AKs equity |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| A♣K♣ vs A♦Q♦ | none | 12 of 12 | 1,184,278 | 72,408 | 455,618 | 71.28% |
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. AKs wins most often with pair (31.0% of boards); AQs with two pair (8.2%). Splits happen when both hands play the same five cards or make the same hand, mostly two pairs.
| Made hand | AKs wins with it | AQs wins with it | Split with it |
|---|---|---|---|
| High card | 11.16% | 0.00% | – |
| Pair | 31.00% | 6.70% | – |
| Two pair | 13.91% | 8.15% | 2.65% |
| Three of a kind | 3.10% | 1.45% | – |
| Straight | 1.65% | 2.04% | 0.94% |
| Flush | 7.04% | 7.03% | 0.15% |
| Full house | 1.18% | 1.12% | 0.47% |
| Four of a kind | 0.06% | 0.06% | 0.03% |
| Straight flush | 0.06% | 0.06% | 0.00% |
| Total | 69.16% | 26.61% | 4.23% |
When calling with AQs is right
If you call an all-in of S with AQs and know you are up against exactly AKs, you win 28.72% of a pot that holds 2S plus whatever dead money D was already in the middle (blinds, antes, earlier bets). Calling breaks even when 28.72% × (2S + D) = S, so D ÷ S = 1 ÷ 0.2872 − 2 = 1.482. A 10 bb shove needs at least 14.8 bb of dead money before calling it with AQs 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: AQs (dealt as A♦Q♦, the most common suit pattern) facing a 10 bb all-in with 2.5 bb already in the middle, against a range of exactly AKs. 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 AKs or AQs
Other domination matchups
| Matchup | First hand | Split | Second hand | Equity bar |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AKo vs AQo | 74.4% | 4.7% | 25.6% | |
| AKo vs AJo | 74.1% | 4.7% | 25.9% | |
| AKo vs A5s | 68.5% | 4.5% | 31.5% | |
| AKo vs KQo | 74.8% | 1.2% | 25.2% | |
| AKo vs KJs | 70.1% | 1.1% | 29.9% | |
| AQo vs AJo | 73.9% | 5.8% | 26.1% |
- 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 AKs at 71.31% 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: aks-vs-aqs.json and the summary matchups.json, built by
tools/build-matchups.mjs.