One of the members of my strategy group is "stuck on" flatting AA vs an open raise 100bb effective.
He came across the idea in Mathew Janda's book Applications.. I saw it, it's definitely in there.

If you don't want to read this thick wall of text you could just answer; do you think it could be better to flat call AA as your standard play in most games from button vs CO or is that sort of ridiculous?

I think it is silly

But Mathew Janda advocated this in his book.

So, just "Should we follow the advice of MJ or should we 3 bet AA CO vs BU which seems SO OBVIOUSLY better to me and what I know about NLH strategy?"

About MJ and flatting AA vs a LP open raise (YUCK)..

This really was just an anecdotal side note in his book and I don't think it was meant to be gospel truth, he just said that he found it helpful and more profitable to have AA in his flat vs CO open range when on the button than putting it into a 3 bet range.

I'm hearing things like "Not flatting AA means our calling range is capped and we can be exploited for not having an uncapped flatting range" and "villain will never expect us to have AA in our calling range so he will be likely to misplay his hand against ours by way of not interpreting our range correctly.


So, my arguments are basically; 1) We would rather cap our flatting range in position than CAP OUR 3 BETTING RANGE (seems rather straight forward to me but????)
2) We should be 3 betting a lot of hands in position against a single raiser when we have the button because.. position.
3) The more very strong hands in our 3 bet range the more we can bluff and the more we can bluff the more hands we can play overall as calls, flats, and raises
4) you can't use "logic" like "we get value by tricking our opponent" because that basically translates to "If we play poorly our opponent will not expect us to play poorly and, therefor, our play won't be poor which means we should use some other play instead because, remember, we don't want to play correctly because our opponents will expect us to,..etc etc etc ad infinitum"

*I call this type of thinking "The Princess Bride Paradox" after the scene in the movie where villain can't drink from the cup that seems obvious but he would be expected to know that so he must drink from the cup he cant drink from so on and so fourth.. very circular and Rock Paper Scissor-esque


But I want to know if maybe there is something I am missing and that AA really ought to be played as a flat call in a lot (maybe most) games for exploitative reasons

or is there some GT based reasons that we may actually prefer to uncap our flatting range even if it means capping our 3 bet range??

Or, if this is as simple as it feels to me, and flatting AA is pretty DAMN bad like I think it is, do you have a good argument that I can maybe use to help my friends to see this?

Skipped the tldr (with your permission).

You can flat but you have to have a balanced flat range that also includes more speculative hands, so you are not exploitable and are balanced.

LOVE the Princess Bride analogy, btw. I imagine the writer was a poker player lol.


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It's much better to make someones life miserable by 3betting them than flatting. Just 3bet them every time.

The pre-flop section of that book is not very good. Flatting AA except for very specific exploitatative reasons (e.g. the SB is a maniac that is almost certain to squeeze and call off a backraise) is basically a blunder.
To prevent your flatting range being too weak and vulnerable to squeezes and overcalls, you just stop flatting so much. (i.e. fold or 3-bet some of the weaker stuff). Most of the hands that you call with should be able to continue when they get squeezed.

I've been mixing in some flats vs people that way overfold to 3bets.. like 80%+... is this not okay? I'm at nl2 so I probably don't understand things at the level you guys do. My logic is that If people are just going to fold to my 3bet with AA some of the time, if I mix in a flat then I may get move value then if I just got their open.

I would widen my 3b range versus nits, not narrow it. So 3b more weak stuff and fold to 4b or proceed with caution when called.


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I would guess that even in theory AA play as pure 3betting strategy.In equilibrium if one hand is played more then one whey that means that booth lines have same EV and its hard to believe is the case with AA BTN vs CO even in theory.But its not like it it dosnt make sense at all to flat AA,because if the board is like 223 or something like that where we have no strong hands at all V should barrel and over bet like crazy because our whole range is bluff catchers at bets so its good to have AA in that spot because they win so much money and AA unlike KK or QQ dont get out draw a lot those are the arguments for calling.My humble opinion is that AA are pure 3bet 100 % of the time but I would not be like super surprised if we should flat some big pokcet pair some small % of the time that that will be AA.


And yes Jand is not saying that you should flat AA 100 % of the time when you have them,he is calling only 1/6 combos,so very very rarely.So unless your friend plays
relatively high he should not worry about it,but if he wants to flat 1 combo of AA its not a big deal it not going to effect his win rate in any significative way,but def dont flat all AA that is absurdly

Then why would somebody ever bluff squeez?

and one more spot;

If we are in LP with AA and we open for 3x and face the bb 3 bet.. should we 4 bet or flat AA.

To me it's the same question, the other hands could be different but this one is the same IMO for the same reasons.. thoughts?

I like to let it rip with AA all in 4b, so hard for BB to find a fold from a hand he would 3b with. Plus you should have a wide range to open with in LP so BB might think you are light. BB is wanting to control the hand while oop, so unlesd he is trying to re-steal with a marginal hand he will have a strong hand that is hard to fold versus what looks like aggro overplay from the LP.


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Its not the same because stack to pot ration is not the same a BB has polarized range.

I don't think the out of position player should be 3betting that polarized actually.

This. You are missing SO much value by flatting because you often won't get the full stack of hands that would 4b and/or GII on flop. Plus people in the blinds will 4b light enough vs. an aggro IP 3bettor that you should 3b and flat the 4b.

Only when a maniac or super whale is in the blinds should you even consider this.

The only time I consider just calling with AA preflop is in tourneys when I have a monster stack and someone shoves 10-20 big blinds and there are other big stacks in the blinds that I want in the pot.

Besides that, 3 bet AA no matter what.

Thanks guys.
I think it is clear that I'm not liking the flat w AA as default. It's obviously going to be good against certain strategies as an exploit. But mostly I think that any time we have a preflo aggro range (again, accept for specific exploitations) AA should go in the aggressive range.
Quick follow up;
Why would we want to flat vs polarized 3 bet range?
If we are in position and bb 3 bets polarized I thought the correct or, I guess, A correct strategy would be to flat call a relatively wide range and to open a 4 bet range even more starkly polarized than the range we expect to play against???

For example:
We open 3xbb from button,
Bb 3 bets polarized and balanced TT+, KQo+, AJ+ and enough bluffs for balance prob using hands that are almost strong enough to call with having some mixture of blockers and equity when called? (Some hands like A5s, 75s, K8s, Q9o)
We call a lot of hands and utilize position and take advantage of the bluffs in 3 bet range by folding less and reraising less than we would against a linear range. Then we 4 bet very small and use some of the very bottom of our range focusing on blockers because we won't be going post flop prob and maybe AA and KK only for value? Maybe w some KK flatting to get very nutted value range forcing villain to fold often even vs our small raise w mix of bluffs but all reducing villains strong hands based on removal effects w such narrow ranges.

Does that not seem reasonable?

The range in your example is not very polarized to me. It means I still get value owned when I call with QJs because of the KQo and AJo in there. Against a polarized range I am going to hit top pair and it will either be the best hand against low equity bluffs (undercards or A5s) or it was already crushed by KK+.

Flatting AA in position can be a way to exploit a player who makes the mistake of double barreling too often on the flop and turn.

We fold some of our cold-calling hands, but the squeezer still expects to win a bigger share of the 3-bet pot than we do when we call the 3-bet. i.e. We just call because it's slightly better than folding and we have the pot odds to continue. The squeezer has the range advantage, so he can make money with his bluffs as well as his value hands.
To do the math, imagine CO opens 2.5x, we call 2.5x on the BTN and the BB squeezes to 10.5bb, CO folds. BB is risking 9.5bb (on top his forced BB). We only need to call 8bb to see a flop, where the pot will be 24bb. BB needs to get 9.5bb from that pot to break even. We only need to win 8bb to break even. In the long run we both win, because of the dead money put in by players who folded pre. Due to his range advantage, the BB might win something like 14/24bb of the pot (4.5bb profit), leaving us with 10bb (2bb more than the cost of calling the 3-bet, and a half big blind loss on the hand in total, but still better than folding pre and losing 2.5bb) and happy days for all concerned, apart from the CO, who probably folded the best hand.

Explain like im 5,

Capped vs uncapped ?

Uncapped means that it is possible for you to have the nuts because the hand that makes the nuts is within the range of card combinations you would play in a manner consistent with how the hand has played has played out so far. Capped means that the best possible hand you could have, given your range, is not the nuts and often far from the nuts.

For example, if you 3bet and you only 3bet with big pairs and maybe AK/AQ and the flop comes all little cards, the cap on what your hand could be is one pair. With sufficiently deep stacks, your opponent can outplay you because your hand is practically face up.

I recently played a live 2/5 game where a V was sitting on $2k+ and I had him covered. He straddled UTG and then flatted with AA to my LP open. You can imagine my reaction at showdown when my KK loses a relatively small $750ish pot...

When the best hand in your range is never as good as the best hand in villain's range (or more generally when you can't have the nuts), your range is capped.
e.g. Villain opens in CO. The best hand in his range is AA. You flat on the button. The best hand in your flatting range is likely to be JJ or TT. Your calling range is "capped" at medium pair, because you'd typically 3-bet with QQ+.

Being capped when you flat-call on the button is partly why the blinds have a great spot to squeeze with a hand like AQ/AK. They only really have to worry about the original raiser having them crushed, because the caller (you) can't have KK/AA. (Hence the debate about whether we should sometimes flat with AA to stop our flatting range being capped).

I suppose this is a bit different because he somehow flats a 3bet right?

It wasn't a 3 bet. He straddled, I opened, and he flatted. (The straddle doesn't count as a 2bet, if that's what you were thinking.)

Just play a 95% / 5% mixed strategy. That way, you almost always 3b AA, but still have it at least some of the time in your flatting range.

Is this because GTO is supposed to be never "always" do a certain thing?

I am not convinced that equilibrium requires randomness in the first 2 bets, such as open the pot and 3bet in position.

It is possible that AA should always be 3bet in position, along with a random selection of weaker hands that can not flat call profitably.

Thoughts?


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