AJo vs 55: preflop equity

AJo against 55: the numbers

AJo, an offsuit hand, plays 55, a pocket pair. One hand holds a pair and the other holds two cards that both outrank it, which keeps the equity closer than most people expect.

That is a slim edge: neither hand is far ahead. Ties are part of the picture: 0.43% of boards end in a split pot, and each side counts that as half a win.

The hand ranking puts AJo at 15 and 55 at 27 out of 169 starting hands.

The board total is exact, 72 deals at 1,712,304 boards each. Won, tied and lost counts are rounded to the nearest thousand from the five-decimal percentages.

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. 55 does best on low rainbow flops (nine high or lower), at 80.19%, and worst on rainbow flops topped by a ten or better, at 47.00%. The lead reverses on rainbow flops topped by a ten or better: there AJo is the favorite even though 55 is ahead overall.

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

The table below sets each hand against its own random-hand baseline: a change of -17.47 points for AJo, from 63.56%, and -6.42 for 55, from 60.33%.

Does a shared suit matter?

Suit overlap shows up in the numbers. With a suit in common 55 has 53.83% equity, and with none in common it has 54.32%. 55 does better with no shared suit, by 0.49 points.

How often this matchup comes up

Counting specific cards, AJo against 55 appears in 72 of the 1,624,350 ordered heads-up deals (0.0044%), and in 144 when the seats are swapped too (0.0089%).

A worked example

Say each player puts $100 in before the flop, making a $200 pot. On average 55 takes back $107.82 of it, which is $7.82 more than it put in, and AJo takes back $92.18, $7.82 less than it put in.

In 1,000 deals of exactly this matchup, expect about 537 won outright by 55, about 459 won outright by AJo and about 4 split.

The same matchup from the other side

Read it from the other side: 55 against AJo is the same matchup with the numbers swapped, so 55 holds 53.91% and AJo holds 46.09%. That address sends you back to this page.

Keep exploring

Open the calculator with AsJh against 5d5c already entered, a deal with no shared suit, and change any card to try your own hand. The matchups after it each swap one hand for a nearby one in the ranking.

• Open AsJh against 5d5c in the equity calculator
• AJo combos
• 55 combos
• AJo vs QJs
• AJo vs K9s
• KQs vs 55
• All hand matchups