Noob question-

Some reg MTT player at my local said something thats been playing on my mind for some time now

He said something a long the lines of 'i'll take 22 vs AK all day, theres only 6 cards for them to hit'

Now his logic made sense to me, but i'm aware low PP's are very much just a coin flip vs AK etc

I also understand he's not taking into account paired boards and higher flush and straight draws.. but can someone give me a better explaination to why its around 50/50 when you're drawing to 6 cards?

Because there are still 5 cards to come. I mean, the answer is, it is because it is.

If you just look at the chance of an A or K coming and forget for a minute about other situations (straights, 2 pairs the counterfeit the underpair, etc, etc) then we have this:

There are 48 unknown cards. 6 of them are an A or a K so we need to count how many board there are with no A and no K, vs how many total boards.

There are C(48, 5) total boards and C(42, 5) of them have no A or K.
so that's 1712304 total and 850668 of them with no A or K.

That comes out to 49.6% of boards without an A or K

The C(n, k) thing, if you're not familiar with it, is a short hand for "number of ways to choose a subset of k items from a total of n items, where order is not important". In this case it's just used to express how many ways to make a board with a given property.

Hold'em Simulation ?
1,712,304 trials (Exhaustive)
Hand Equity Wins Ties
2c2s 52.26% 889,226 11,179
AcKs 47.74% 811,899 11,179


2c2h 49.92% 849,322 10,775
AsKs 50.08% 852,207 10,775