Calling All In preflop with AKs, QQ

I witnessed a semi-interesting hand (to me anyway) hand last week that I wanted to look at. Here was how it went down:

UTG just lost a big pot and is likely tilting (he had K3 against my KQ on a AxKKT board and goes on hyper-tilt when these kinds of things happen). The stacks are UTG:10K, Button:20K, BB:20K. With the blinds at 75/150, UTG makes it 500. Folds to the button who is the tightest player in the universe; he makes it 1500. The BB makes it 3500, UTG moves in for about 10K and the button calls.

The question is this -- should we move in here with QQ or AKs? I say neither hand is playable, and that they are both about as bad. A freind of mine who shall remain nameless maintains that he would play QQ but not AKs in this spot. Remember that the main 3-way pot is 30K and the side pot with the button is 20K. Also note that we have the same amount of fold equity with QQ or AKs in this spot so showing which hand has more "showdown value" in the pot is sufficient to show that the hand is "more playable" in this pot. Now we need to assign ranges to UTG and button. UTG has a fairly large but not totally ridiculous range here, maybe {TT+, AKs, AK}. Button has a pretty small range for calling UTG's all in, but this range is largely irrelevant (excpet for one fact that I'll mention later) since I'm only interested in whether it's better to take AKs or QQ in this spot. Button's calling range if we jam is very small, probably {KK+}.

First let's pokerstove some shit. There are 4 matchups that we care about for this analysis. I'll just show the equity in case

main pot:
{QQ} vs. {KK+} vs. {TT+, AKs, AK} -- 16.94%
{AKs} vs. {KK+} vs. {TT+, AKs, AK} -- 17.65%

side pot:
{QQ} vs. {KK+} -- 18.26%
{AKs} vs. {KK+} -- 23.12%

We have more equity in both pots with AKs than QQ! For some reason I was actually surprised to see AKs do better than QQ against the range {KK+}. There is another final reason that AKs is better than QQ here. If the button's calling range is only AA and KK, you'd rather have AKs than QQ because having AKs makes it less likely that your opponent has one of those two hands.

I thought it would be closer to equal with QQ being better by a little, but it's not even close. Of course, I think folding both hands is pretty obvious here.


In other news, I've played a small amount over the last couple weeks and won a little. My wife also asked me today to teach her how to play poker. So I'm going to try to teach her a little bit about limit hold'em when I'm not doing school/work stuff or disproving the wacky poker ideas of the people I hang out with (see above). Maybe she'll end up being the poker player in the family!

That's all I have in me tonight -- Goodnight everyone.