Pay Attention to Your Kicker

by: Lou Krieger©

With communal cards that belong to everybody, it’s not unusual for two hold’em players to have an identical hand except for the unpaired side card. It’s that side card, or kicker, which often spells the difference between winning and losing a pot.

The reason A-K is regarded as a big hand while A-2 is better off thrown away the majority of the time is the strength of the kicker. If you flop a pair with A-K, it is guaranteed to be the highest possible pair with the best possible kicker. But with A-2, you’ll either flop a pair of aces with the worst possible kicker or a pair of deuces that seldom figures to be the best hand regardless of the fact that its side card is an ace.

Let’s walk through an example. Suppose you’ve been dealt A-Q and I have A-5. If the flop is A-4-4, we’ve each made two pair. And if things ended right here, you would win based on the strength of your kicker. After all, A-A-4-4-Q is a better hand than A-A-4-4-5.

I can only win by catching a five on the turn or the river. And if I did, my A-A-5-5-4 would beat your A-A-4-4-Q. It’s a longshot; I have to catch one of the three remaining fives in the deck. No other cards in the deck can help me win, though there are a few that would force a tied hand and we’d split the pot. If a king were to fall then we’d both have A-A-4-4-K, and the communal king would obviate your previously superior queen kicker. Because it’s shared by both of us, we’d each have an identical hand and the pot would be split neatly in half.

Sometimes the kicker comes into play even when there isn’t a pair on board. Suppose the board read A-9-8-7-2 at hand’s end. With your A-Q, you’d hold A-A-Q-9-8. With my A-5, the best hand I could make from my two private cards and the five board cards would be A-A-9-8-7. My five is so pitifully small that it wouldn’t even play, and your pair of aces with a queen kicker would take the pot and my pair of aces with its sorry kicker would be kicked to the curb.

That’s why most savvy players throw away two-card holdings with weak kickers. With a weak kicker, you’re never quite as sure how you stack up during the play of the hand. As a result, you’re frequently relegated to passive play. Even if you win with a hand like A-5, it will probably be less than you would have won by aggressively betting a hand like A-K, all the way to the river.

Although never desirable, weak side cards are worse with an ace in your hand than they are with any other card in the deck. Here’s why. Many of your opponents love aces and will eagerly play any ace they are dealt. They won’t do that with any other card.

Hands like K-3 or Q-5 are seldom played — even the weakest of your opponents learn to throw them away — but some of your opponents will play hands like A-5 and A-3 regularly.

If you play a weak king and are fortunate enough to catch a king on the flop, you stand a pretty good chance of being the only player holding a pair of kings. Your odds are even better if the pot was not raised before the flop — thus minimizing the chances that anyone was dealt such obvious raising hands as A-K, K-Q, or K-J.

But when you play a weak ace, the implications can be horrific. You’re likely to find that someone else holds an ace too. And while his kicker might be weak, it’s probably better than a trey or a deuce. Even if you jump into the pot with a middle-of-the-road kicker like A-7 or A-8, you won’t have any idea whether yours is the best hand.

That’s kicker trouble. It’s an occupational disease of poker players. It happens to everyone. Even the very best players run into it every now and then. But you can minimize its chances of striking you. If you’re playing A-Q, the only way you can run into kicker trouble is if your opponent was dealt A-K, and there’s a lot less likelihood of that happening than if you decide to play A-3 or A-4 and run into another player who was fortunate enough to be dealt an ace too.