In a tournament final table situation, why are hands like AK and AQ often better candidates to go all-in with preflop than medium-strong pairs like TT and JJ?
(Hint: there is more than one reason 
)
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Great question and Interesting article.
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blackrain is a great resource! especially for beginning players he has a lot of really good foundational tips in an easy to absorb style. nice link
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@southwestmba tell us the answer!
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I’d say main reasons are because they block opponents monster value (AA, KK, QQ) and because they have a lot more potential and outs to improve (top pair, straight, flush if suited etc) than middling pocket pairs, which only tend to have big showdown value when they improve to a set.
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Well said!
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I may not be able to say specifically but played AK all in, almost every time in Marathon Final. It paid off in many ways, made 2cd place for a nice prize!! Maybe next time 1st lol. GL everyone at the tables & thanks @Younguru for the topic, that reminded me of the statistic’s of the play 
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JJ/TT are likely ahead when called though, or will at least be ahead more often than AK/AQ, and we’re already all-in, so I don’t think it actually matters much that AK/AQ are more likely to make a really strong hand. When called you’d likely win just as often if not slightly more holding JJ/TT, but AK/AQ block way more hands than just the premium pocket pairs that can call, so the fold equity with AK/AQ is going to be significantly higher.
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Ultimately it doesn’t really matter as they’re both shoves in basically all late stage tourney scenarios, but when the action goes a certain way (eg sitting in SB 10-15bb effective and 2-3 shoves in front of you) you’re often gonna be crushed with tens or jacks but have some equity with AKs, AQs, AKo etc
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I was thinking that too, although more with how many people there are that might call behind. It wasn’t entirely clear to me that AK/AQ do have more equity though, because often your outs will be blocked by the other all ins.
I was also thinking JJ/TT might play ok as a raise/call, but I think you want stronger pairs for that.
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This is the real point that hit me this past week - the removal to other strong broadway hands makes it appreciably less likely that you will be called and enter a race/flip situation (not sure how much less and don’t care to try to work it out myself haha).
Anecdotally it felt like I was doing better with AK/AQ than TT/JJ and I wanted to understand why; I think this is the main reason. Both hands perform similarly when called, but the big broadways get called less often because villain is less likely to hold a calling hand.
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Regarding the more disadvantageous side of the blocker effects — there is a weird scenario that occurs every now and then where 3 or more players go all-in preflop, with very low SPRs (like average stack is 10bb or less). In these situations I think we can sometimes “go for it” with a hand like 78s, assuming that at least 2 of the all-in players are sharing unpaired high card outs. Not sure how extreme the assumption has to be before this play is strictly “good” but it sure is fun when you guess right and the runout comes low 
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yeah, it’s nice that AK is only dominated by exactly two hands, and even against one of those (KK) we are still only 2:1 behind (we all know how often the “1” hits in those situations - aka 100% of the time when we are the one with KK). And we dominate a LOT of combos.
TT/JJ are dominated by slightly more hands, and flipping against many more combos of hands that we “beat” (AQ/AK).
finally - and this is a silly kind of “meta” reason but I think it has real value - there are STILL a decent % of players who frown on going all in pre with AK. these players will label you a “bingo” player and perhaps play worse against you because they think you are “a gambler.” bonus! 
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I took a look at the equities of AK/AQ and JJ/TT vs one or two callers - obviously it’s going to depend a bit on what the ranges the callers have, but the general trend is that JJ/TT wins the pot outright slightly more often, but also loses slightly more often (ie AK/AQ quite often chop with the caller(s))
So you’ll double up more often with the medium-strong pairs, but you’ll also bust out more often too. There’s not much in it, but I can imagine there would be situations in tournaments where the reward is not worth as much as the risk, and AK/AQ would be better hands in that case.
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thanks for running the numbers! yeah, this matches my lived experience. often at a late-stage FT survival is highly profitable, so I guess that’s why I initially thought of this point in that configuration, though I hadn’t put it all together yet.
翻前3张不中，后面几乎只有百分之30的胜率。AK AQ的一百种死法，TG:@xhb9527
会告诉你的
Translate:
If you miss 3 cards before the flop, your winning rate is almost only 30%. AK AQ’s One Hundred Ways to Die, TG: @xhb9527
will tell you
Great discussion.
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pushing some times is more to fun and the players will take out each other 2
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