KK vs QJ
A pair of kings against queen-jack, all in before the flop. Connected cards below the pair, with straights and flushes as their main hope.
Also written as kings vs queen-jack. Suitedness variants: KK vs QJs and KK vs QJo.
The numbers
KK
a pair of kings
85.4%
equity
QJ
queen-jack
14.6%
equity
| Outcome | Share of boards |
|---|---|
| KK wins | 85.2% |
| QJ wins | 14.4% |
| Split pot | 0.4% |
Exact, not simulated. KK means a pair of kings and QJ means queen-jack: 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 kings is ahead and both of queen-jack's cards are lower than the pair, so pairing up is usually not enough — a queen or a jack on the board still leaves queen-jack behind the pair of kings.
Queen-jack still wins 14.4% 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 three different straights to aim at.
Suitedness is part of the answer: against the pair of kings, QJs wins 17.5% and QJo wins 13.4%. The QJ 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 — Kof spadesKof hearts against Qof spadesJof 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.