AA vs KQ
A pair of aces against king-queen, all in before the flop. Two big unpaired cards that pairing up cannot rescue.
Also written as aces vs king-queen. Suitedness variants: AA vs KQs and AA vs KQo.
The numbers
AA
a pair of aces
86.1%
equity
KQ
king-queen
13.9%
equity
| Outcome | Share of boards |
|---|---|
| AA wins | 85.9% |
| KQ wins | 13.7% |
| Split pot | 0.4% |
Exact, not simulated. AA means a pair of aces and KQ means king-queen: 96 legal ways to deal the two hands, and every one of the 1,712,304 possible five-card boards dealt for each — 164,381,184 board-and-hand combinations in total, each one scored by the same evaluator the calculator uses. Combinations that are the same hand with the suits renamed were counted once and weighted by how many they stand for: 6 distinct suit patterns stand in for all 96, which is the same answer for 16 times less work.
Why it comes out this way
The pair of aces is ahead and both of king-queen's cards are lower than the pair, so pairing up is usually not enough — a king or a queen on the board still leaves king-queen behind the pair of aces.
King-queen still wins 13.7% of the time, and almost all of it comes from straights, flushes and two pair rather than from pairing one card. Its two ranks sit next to each other, which gives them two different straights to aim at.
Suitedness is part of the answer: against the pair of aces, KQs wins 16.9% and KQo wins 12.7%. The KQ wins figure in the table is the average of both, weighted the way they actually come out of a deck — one suited combination for every three offsuit.
The pot is split 0.4% of the time.
Open it in the calculator
The link below deals one typical version of this matchup — Aof spadesAof hearts against Kof spadesQof diamonds — into the calculator, with both hands set and the board empty. Add community cards one at a time to watch the equity move, or change a card to see how much the suits are worth.