Hi Everyone

I am in the process of reading Harrington on Cash Games Vol. 1 and it seems to be a great read so far. However, I may well have misunderstood something but I feel that there may be contradictory advice being given about playing A,K facing a raise on the flop. In the playing individual hands section Harrington states that facing a raise on the flop he will call with an A,K hand. This seems to be in keeping with the intro on how the A,K hand is not so strong in cash game play than it is in tournament play and keeping the pot small etc.

However in the examples section there are two examples I have come across where facing a raise with A,K he endorses reraising over the top. I am confused as to the best way of playing the hand on the flop, can anyone clear things up for me?.

Many Thanks
Adam

Alot of the situations are dependent on the player your up against.

also stakes play a huge part in this. in the mircos you would just fold normally your AK if you didnt pair. Just becuase your reraise wont cause anyone to fold and you end up losing in the end with Ace high when someone else has a pair of 6s or something stupid.

Sorry I made a mistake I meant preflop and not on the flop. However I would be interested to hear your thoughts. Let's say you have reraised your A,K preflop and the pot is building up. The flop misses your A,K and your opponent checks to you and you have no read on them, I would take a stab at the pot pretty much every time and if I get called I am slowing right down on the turn. I would say that 85% plus times players are betting with their A,K if they are checked too.

On the reverse side if I am first to act on the flop I feel I really should take a stab at the pot as a check is an open invitation for someone to bluff at me. Is this wrong?

Adam

what page the examples on - might aswell have a look seeing as i keep meaning to read it.

page 150 playing individual hands (preflop)

on the subject of a,k

"if there are limpers i will raise them, if there is a raiser i will call"

page 210 hand 3-22

facing a raise from one off the button where you are in the big blind "you are certainly going to raise with your a,k"

page 188 hand 3-10 is also interesting and i can't get my head around , after advocating the virtues of how the value of a,k is less in cash games committing so many chips to the pot with a reraise of 70bb against a number of opponents seems to go against the original advice

ok skimmed thru it.

where he discusses calling to a raiser i think mostly he is referring to full ring which i don't play but mostly i would suggest that to an ep normal tightish raiser you can either call or 3bet. it does seem a bit nitty to me to generalise calling AK more often than not.

in the 210 example what he is trying to achieve is take the pot down p/f. it's a loose table and a lp raiser most likely has a wide range here. hu AK is prolly beating his range. sb calls so he has a hand he wants to see the flop with but not a premium hand as you would expect a rr here. in the example he suggests raising bigger than usual as he wants to win the pot now and he is oop.

on page 188 it seems to me that he isn't playing AK for it's merit, he is representing AA/KK. he limp r/r from utg which represents a very strong hand (you will see this quite a bit at the micros on-line). he also thinks he has established no-one else has A's or K's worth calling the raise with so even if player c calls he may be up against a pp or high cards so is still in with a shot.

i think you're right though that reading those things he says about AK in cash games is very confusing (and probably not the best advice I dunno??) but looking at the examples you mention he isn't playing AK on the strenght of the hand alone but looking at the wider picture by, in #1 thinking about the villians hand in comparison to his, and 2# representing a different hand.

my 2c