How to play

Big Slick

By John Vorhaus

July 2006

You're only really in grim shape when you run into A-A or K-K

Ace-King aka big slick – one of the top 10 hands in Hold’em by anyone’s start chart. Yet, strong as it is, there’s a cloud hanging over the hand, one that goes all the way back to the Texas origins of no-limit Hold’em, where they’d call the hand ‘Walking back to Houston’, because if you played big slick often enough in Dallas, that’s how you’d be getting home.

These days, the wags tell a different joke, calling A-K Anna Kournikova because ‘it looks great, but never wins’. That’s a pretty harsh indictment of a woman who plays tennis better than you or I ever will, and an equally harsh indictment of a hand that, apart from pocket pairs, you’d be happiest to hold in Hold’em.

So why does big slick get such a bad rap? Because it’s an easy hand to get stuck on and, as such, an easy hand to go broke with. If you play it often enough and push it hard enough, you will get burned – something which rarely happens with obvious junk hands and easy folds. Bad cards, in other words, don’t seduce and abandon. Big slick does that every day.

Despite its complexity, A-K is far too good a hand ...