I really don't understand the criticism of raising to $15 UTG with AA at all.
As played, it's hard to believe neither of them have a 5x or 22 - at least without knowing more about them.

When I posted that the UTG raise to $15 was too small, I thought this was 2/5. Raising to $15 in a 1/3 game is 100% fine.

So you really believe that you're skilled enough to extract value from AA when you are UTG in a limped, 8-way pot?

Yet, you don't feel skilled enough to play it UTG in a 4-way raised pot?

Id be willing to bet any amount of money that I win more BBs/hand with AA than GG does.

I do limp/reraise it sometimes, but limping can not be the default play just because youre afraid you might get too many callers. Hands that get posted here will usually be more difficult than an avg hand. OP most likely couldve opened $15 with AA on this same table 10 other times and got 0-3 callers and played a normal pot. The fact that he got 7 callers this time doesnt mean did he anything wrong or that he should play it like GG thinks he should.

I think the only reason why GG's winrate is relatively respectable is, precisely, the fact that he gets max value paid off with KK+ because his opponents are that terrible.

It's also biasing his advice pretty bad because a lot of low stakes games don't have 4-5 callers to 10x BB open raises.

But I have played in games where I played like a turbo nit and these clowns would call any limp/reraise size if they were the PF raiser. Im dead serious. Clown with a 40% PFR percentage would raise to $18 or whatever, I would re-raise to $120 and the dipsh*t would auto-call without even tanking.


Limp/re-raise in donk fest games is really the only thing I don't disagree with GG on. If the guy's have such ego problems or compulsively can't bring themselves to fold, then we really should go for the max exploit and cram as much money in PF as possible.

Sure, but if his games were really as donk filled as that, then his overall win rate should be more like 10-15BB, not 7BB or less.

You would have to lay some crazy odds before I would even consider that bet. I play with nits like GG, and it's amazing how even the loosest players who you wouldn't think are even paying the slightest bit of attention suddenly fold when they raise.

This is a good post. Sometimes you raise AA to the right amount and still get 7 callers. It sucks. You just man up and deal with it. Sometimes poker puts you in high variance marginally profitable spots, and you have to skillfully maneuver them. It's what helps separate the crushers from the 4bb/hr ABC players.

This hand is a really sick spot. The price isn't bad, but it's really hard to imagine V2 not having it here. V1 being all in removes a lot of his bluff equity, and on this board wtf hands is he semi-bluffing with anyways. I've definitely seen people overplay their weaker overpairs on these types of boards, so I get wanting to call V1. But once V2 back-jams it's just getting really hopeful that they both have like 88 & 99. The V2 calling range in a bloated pot like this contains like 10 billion 5x combos. I'd fold.

Thing is a lot of 4 way normal raised pots with AA are not particularly difficult, you cbet and all fold or you cbet and a shorty jams all folds to you and we snap or we cbet one caller barrel turn he folds. We pick up 15bb to 50bb or lose to the shorty for whatever reason and life goes on.

It’s the outliers when we get out in sick spots...in fact this is a legit nasty spot, most ‘sick’ spots go cbet, raise, jam back to us 180bb effective and we snap fold.

Pretty sure GGs plan is to LRR to control SPR and if that doesn’t work, he’s set-mining. Folding to any pressure postflop unless we have top set is an easy strat, in fact limp and reraise big enough so that we can trivially GII on nearly any runout when called is also easy.

It’s just not the best way to play AA in a vacuum. But it’s definitely easy.

BTW I’ve played against a reg who has twice LRR quite large on me when I iso’d him and I snap folded because I wasn’t born yesterday. I’m not the only person in the room with a functioning brain either so that’s another reason I’m not a fan of LRR.

I think its very easy for someone to have a stong hand here 22, A5s, 56s, 45s, 35s, 57s. If V1 was weaker he may have wanted to reraise hero before V2 had the opportunity to jamm. Instead V1 called (which is what most people do when they flop a huge hand) keeping V2 in the hand. V1 knows his hand will have to be good enough to win a showdown against some pair or pairs yet he quickly shoves over the All in and call. I would think he has at least a 5 and fold the overpair.

Results:

I'm too lazy to tally, but how many of us folded to the postflop action? Folding as a monster favourite in a huge pot is a huge mistake (as is getting in our stack as a monster dog); it's going to be difficult to be a long term winner if we do that on a consistent basis, and yet preflop sets up those spots all the time, where we'll be facing stack committing decisions on the flop with no benefit of extra streets worth of information.

But I'll say what I always say in this preflop spot: if this is the spot you're looking for, the one you thrive in, the one you fistpump when it happens, then you'll do fine, so obviously keep doing that. I don't do too well in these spots myself (I would have made a *massive* mistake on the flop), so I avoid them.

Gdowhatyouwant,forrealG

GG being results oriented in this thread. Being up against two under PPs was a long shot scenatio given the action. Sometimes we get "bluffed" out of a big pot by someone overplaying their hand. A far more common occurence is being up against trips.

The overall point is that this spots comes up all the time, so we better get real good at dealing with it correctly. In this case (and lots of other cases that involved very small SPRs due to going very multiway to the flop), if both guys hadda just flatted our bet we'd have just $125 left (against the shorter stack) in a $255 pot 3ways on the turn (our plan?).

I guess another preflop test is this. If you are hoping a cbet takes down these pots almost always (winning a decent pot without putting the rest of your stack at risk), then you likely should be going for a limp/reraise preflop. If you're hoping your flop cbet in these spots gets action by one or more players, then you'll be totally fine with preflop.

GcluelessNLnoobG

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot????

We now saw the results. For me it was an easy call and I was right THIS time. I understand I wont be right EVERY time, but if we saw 50 hands similar to this posted and a person said fold 50 times.....and they were way ahead 42 of those times, they might actually learn that this is a call, not a fold.

That was my point.

Without results, people will continue to make the same mistakes.

What a strange hand. I would have folded and then kicked myself. It's so easy for V1 or V2 to have 22 or 5x in their hand.

Of course they could have 22 or 5x, but its rare that people play those hands this way. They would be much more likely to slow play those hands on this specific board. That's the point. Its much more likely that villains had medium pocket pairs that they thought were the best hand and were afraid of over cards beating them.

You know, I didn't see that this was rainbow, I thought the five and 2 were suited. Carry on with the shoving