Hold A♠A♥ in PLO6 (six-card Pot-Limit Omaha) and the hand can rank anywhere from the Top 0.02% to Top 52% — worse than half the field. The two Aces are the same every time. What decides it is the other four cards, and above all whether each Ace has a suit partner.
Key numbers
- A♠ A♥ K♠ Q♥ J♦ 10♦ (Aces suited to broadway): Top 0.02% in PLO6.
- A♠ A♥ 7♠ 2♥ 3♦ 4♣ (Aces suited to junk): Top 6.14%.
- A♠ A♥ 7♣ 2♦ 3♣ 4♦ (Aces suited to nothing): Top 52% — the same six ranks as the hand above; only the suits changed.
- Hands holding a pair of Aces get more common from PLO4 to PLO6 (2.57% → 6.08%); Aces with four broadway cards get about 5 times rarer.
- In PLO6, 23,539 hand classes without a single Ace rank above “Aces suited to junk”. In PLO4: 0.
Three hands, one pair of Aces
All three hands hold the same A♠A♥. Each column shows where the hand ranks inside its own game — its percentile: the rank divided by the number of hand classes in that game. The PLO4 and PLO5 versions use the first four and five cards of each hand.
| Hand | Cards (PLO6) | PLO4 | PLO5 | PLO6 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aces suited to broadway | A♠ A♥ K♠ Q♥ J♦ 10♦ | Top 0.18% | Top 0.12% | Top 0.02% |
| Aces suited to junk | A♠ A♥ 7♠ 2♥ 3♦ 4♣ | Top 0.53% | Top 2.19% | Top 6.14% |
| Aces suited to nothing | A♠ A♥ 7♣ 2♦ 3♣ 4♦ | Top 4.53% | Top 26.59% | Top 52% |
The broadway hand gets better as the game adds cards. The other two go the other way: suited to junk slides from Top 0.53% to Top 6.14%, and suited to nothing collapses from Top 4.53% to Top 52%.
Top X% of what?
A percentile compares a hand with the other hands of its own game — never across games. PLO4 has 16,432 hand classes, PLO5 134,459 and PLO6 962,988: the field a PLO6 hand has to beat is about 59 times the PLO4 field. “Top 6.14% in PLO6” tells you where the hand stands among PLO6 hands, which is the question that matters at a PLO6 table.
Junk or nothing: the suits decide
“Suited to junk” and “suited to nothing” hold exactly the same six ranks — A, A, 7, 2, 3, 4. Only the suits differ:
- Suited to junk: each Ace shares a suit with a small card (A♠ with 7♠, A♥ with 2♥).
- Suited to nothing: there is no other ♠ or ♥ in the hand.
In Omaha you must play exactly two cards from your hand, so an Ace with no suit partner can never make a flush. That suit difference alone moves the hand from Top 6.14% to Top 52% in PLO6.
An honest note: the broadway hand also holds a third suited pair (J♦10♦), which the junk hand does not. Give it the junk hand’s suit skeleton — A♠ A♥ K♠ Q♥ J♦ 10♣ — and it ranks Top 0.15%: most of the gap to the junk hand is still there.
Why it goes both ways: counting, not simulation
The rankings above come from simulation. This part does not — it is exact combinatorics over every concrete hand in each game.
| Game | All hands | Holding a pair of Aces | Two Aces + four broadway |
|---|---|---|---|
| PLO4 | 270,725 | 2.57% | 0.266% |
| PLO5 | 2,598,960 | 4.17% | 0.129% |
| PLO6 | 20,358,520 | 6.08% | 0.054% |
Aces are everywhere in PLO6. Aces with the right company almost never are: two Aces plus four broadway cards are about 5 times rarer in PLO6 than in PLO4.
You hold a pair of Aces in PLO6. What is next to them?
| A pair of Aces plus… | Of all PLO6 hands | If you hold AA |
|---|---|---|
| 4 broadway cards | 0.054% | 0.9% |
| 3 broadway cards | 0.528% | 8.7% |
| 2 broadway cards | 1.754% | 28.9% |
| 1 broadway card | 2.339% | 38.5% |
| no broadway | 1.060% | 17.4% |
| a third or fourth Ace | 0.345% | 5.7% |
| total | 6.08% | 100% |
The first column is the chance of being dealt that hand at all; the second is the chance given you already hold a pair of Aces. The most likely company is a single broadway card (38.5%); all four broadway happens 0.9% of the time. And only 49% of the four-broadway hands have both Aces suited — a hand like the one at the top of this article is one in 3,770 PLO6 hands.
Who passes you
Count the hand classes ranked above “Aces suited to junk” that hold no Ace at all:
| Game | Classes above it with no Ace |
|---|---|
| PLO4 | 0 |
| PLO5 | 337 |
| PLO6 | 23,539 |
In PLO4, nothing without an Ace beats that hand. In PLO6, 23,539 hand classes do.
What it means at the table
In PLO6 the Aces are not the hand. The other four cards are. Every card the game adds improves the whole field at once; a hand that does not improve with it goes backwards without anything about it changing — which is how the same two Aces end up at Top 0.02% in one hand and Top 52% in another.
How these numbers were produced
- Ranking: playability, 6-max in all three games. The PLO4 and PLO5 orderings are ProPokerTools reference files; the PLO6 ranking is ours — see how we built it.
- Simulated: the order of the ranking (rank and percentile). Deeper in the ranking the estimates are less precise, which is why those percentiles are shown without decimals (Top 52%).
- Exact: every count — hands, hand classes, and every share of hands on this page.
- Classes, not hands: a percentile counts hand classes, and every class counts once, however many concrete hands it stands for (up to 24).