Ace-King aka big slick – one of the top 10 hands in Hold’em by anyone’s start chart. Yet, strong as it is, there’s a cloud hanging over the hand, one that goes all the way back to the Texas origins of no-limit Hold’em, where they’d call the hand ‘Walking back to Houston’, because if you played big slick often enough in Dallas, that’s how you’d be getting home.

These days, the wags tell a different joke, calling A-K Anna Kournikova because ‘it looks great, but never wins’. That’s a pretty harsh indictment of a woman who plays tennis better than you or I ever will, and an equally harsh indictment of a hand that, apart from pocket pairs, you’d be happiest to hold in Hold’em.