99 vs A9o: preflop equity

99 against A9o: the numbers

The matchup pits a pocket pair against an offsuit hand. The pair already holds one of the other hand's ranks, and that overlap cuts down the cards the other hand can pair with.

That is a clear edge, 70.45% to 29.55%, but A9o still wins often enough that one hand proves nothing. Ties are 2.28% of the outcomes here; each tied board gives both hands half the pot.

For context, 99 sits at number 6 of 169 starting hands and A9o at number 25 when each is run against a random hand.

Exact total: 36 deals times 1,712,304 boards. The other three counts come from the five-decimal percentages and are rounded to the nearest thousand, so read them as approximate.

The last column is the smallest pot odds, written as a pot-to-call ratio, at which a call breaks even with this equity.

Who is ahead on which flops

The flop changes the picture. 99 does best on low rainbow flops (nine high or lower), at 85.02%, and worst on monotone flops, at 63.18%. 99 stays ahead on all five textures, but the swing between them is large, so how the flop looks matters a great deal.

Read the flop types this way: rainbow has three suits, two-tone has two cards of one suit, monotone has three, and paired repeats a rank.

Compared with a random hand

A random hand would give 99 72.06% and A9o 60.77%. Against each other the change is -1.61 points for 99 and -31.22 for A9o.

Does a shared suit matter?

Does suit overlap move the numbers? 99 has 70.40% when the hands share a suit and 70.56% when they do not. The two rows differ by only 0.16 points, so suits barely change this matchup.

How often this matchup comes up

Counting specific cards, 99 against A9o appears in 36 of the 1,624,350 ordered heads-up deals (0.0022%), and in 72 when the seats are swapped too (0.0044%).

A worked example

Put $100 each into a $200 pot and deal every board once: 99 averages $140.90 back, ahead of its $100 by $40.90, while A9o averages $59.10, short of its $100 by $40.90.

Scaled to 1,000 deals, that is roughly 693 wins for 99, 284 for A9o and 23 chopped pots.

The same matchup from the other side

Swap the hands and you get A9o with 29.55% against 99 with 70.45%. We keep one page per matchup, with the better-ranked hand first.

Keep exploring

Try 9s9h against Ad9c in the calculator: the hands share no suit, and every card can be changed. The links after it are the closest matchups in the ranking.

• Open 9s9h against Ad9c in the equity calculator
• 99 combos
• A9o combos
• 99 vs KJo
• 99 vs 55
• 88 vs A9o
• All hand matchups