Just back from a few days at the Borgata. Once on this trip, and one on my last trip, I thought I played brilliantly and managed to get it all in preflop with AA.


This trip, I was UTG+1, and limped, expecting someone to raise. My expectations at that time were that the HJ $240 and SB $260 were going at it, and I (cover) would be happy to pick off the SB who was going to shove with crap. As expected, the HJ makes a raise (I think it was to $8, and the SB pops it to $18 or something silly. I raise to $50, HJ calls and SB shoves. I tank shove (didn't know SB covered HJ) and HJ tank calls. $700+ shipped to the HJ with TT, after AKQ-J-X SB mucked.


Last trip, I manage to limp raise AA and get a $100, $200 and $250 stack all-in preflop (I cover). $200 stack shows up with KJ and hits 2 pr.


I think I'm 60% to win vs TT and a random. Winning $1500+ the 3 times I win, losing $500 total when each of the other guys win. I was fine losing and didn't actually tilt until a few hands later when the TT guy stacked another guy and racked up to leave.

I thought I ran the numbers and was around the same 60% vs AQ, KJ and random with the 4 way. Winning $1650 the 3 winning time, losing $450 losing to the $200 and $250 stacks the other 2 times. The KJ was a very old man, who slowly turned his cards over last, and for some reason I got tilted and left for a cigar immediately, if I wasn't tilted, I'm pretty sure I would have made at least some of it back.

Yes, I know BBV is ----->

SO am I making mistakes pricing in this many players when I have AA preflop, or should I embrace the variance and continue to try to get it all-in against as many players as possible with AA? Personal preference and tolerance for swings? Are there enough DBs that will rack up after a big win like that, and not give me a chance to get even?

I just read the thread title...

The answer is "all of them."

Unless people are willing to raise/fold > 50% of their stack.

^^This.

It also isn't your money when the hand is over and you lost. Poker is hard in that you can make the right decision and still lose your money. If you can't get over this, it is time to find something else to do.

I'll keep this thread open a while longer, but any good advice is going to be the same.

Ya, easily most +EV having as many people call our shove with AA as possible.

The more interesting/difficult discussion is what percentage of our stack should we be happy getting in with AA and going allway.

G10?20?more?notsure...G

"AA all-in preflop - How many callers do you want?"

How many are sitting in?That's how many.
Though not apropos to getting it all in with aces and getting coolered, this is a bad habit: limping in with the intention to re-raise. It's something I don't do very frequently, and I need a very good reason to try it.

You're better off open-raising with aces from any position, especially up-front. They can put you on all sorts of hands, but l/r looks way too much like aces getting "creative".

Anyone who says the whole table doesn't know anything about poker math. Your 82+% to win with AA AGAINST ONE PLAYER. You reduce by 10% for every person that stays in after that. So if your against two people your a 72% fav, against three 62%. A whole table??? You do the math. A whole table is getting 8-1. Not many hands to fold with those odds. One more thing....limp re -raises preflop, just turn your hand face up. GL

The guy managed to get it allin pre with AA against several inferior hands like KJ- seems like the limp reraise "turn your hand faceup" worked pretty well for OP or what?

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I'm going to give the benefit of the doubt and not infract you for intentionally bad strat. I kinda hope you're leveling, even though I'm wrong not to infract you if you are.

Here's a hint. What would you rather have, 82% of $1000, or 72% of $1500?

*******I'm not trolling but may have been trolled when I recieved this insight.


A gentleman I played with recently claimed to be oneof the top high stakes mtt players in the world. I looked him up and he did have a few large (over 250k) money finishes but his backstory (which he gave me in great detail I assume because he was drunk had a few holes in it so I'm not sure how much I believe him.) Anywho, he was of the opinion, particularly in a deep cash game that getting it in preflop with aces or kings was suboptimal of a player is confident in his handreading and player reading skills is a bad thing from a variance and maximum ev perspective.

I say weird stuff at the tables all the time to make myself look dumb so it is entirely possible that is the case. I just can't see too many situations other than nailing flops along with your opponent (flush over flush) that are more ev+ than aces vs kings. He just said he doesn't like to put it in until the flop because there is no skill advantage and only a "luck" advantage. I'm still not sure what to make of our convo.

I suppose I deserve at least some of that.

I know what I want from an EV perspective, but wondered if there were people that are risk averse and would rather win more smaller pots, reducing EV and variance.

Safe to assume, than no posters (yet) have any such concerns.

As much as I've learned, I don't think that I want to always/never anything (although some may be really close to 0 or 100%). I correctly thought there were ways to get stacks in preflop, by limping early. Both tables had multiple people that were very unlikely to have an unraised pot, and if nobody has anything worth opening, then how much am I going to get into the pot anyway. The strategy of limping in those cases, was very table/player dependent, and with the thoughts that opening and re-raising would be stronger than limp raising. I may be wrong about that.

In any case, thanks for indulging me. This thread may have run its course.

My recollection is that against random hands, AA's win increases with each additional player up to fourteen, and starts to decline a little with additional players. The fifteenth player's call does not add quite enough to the pot to make up for the aces' loss of equity; but the fourteenth player definitely does.

So yeah, at a nine- or ten-handed table, the right answer to "How many player do you want all-in preflop when you've got AA" is "All of them."

If there actually was a formula like subtract 10% for each additional caller then if you had a sufficient number of callers you'd be drawing dead with your aces. Since you're never drawing dead with aces pre-flop, I don't think that there's actually a formula like subtract 10% for each caller.

More importantly, remember that hand strength is positive correlated -- I.e. people tend to play good hands and fold bad ones.

You are rarely against "random" hands.

The "superior" good hand dominates the "inferior" good hands.

This is incorrect. There are several occasions where limp reraising with powerful hands is a fine play. For instance, when you wake up with something big and there's a "I have to raise my straddle every time" guy left to act. I even managed to get it all in vs J10 off for 100bb the other day because "He was priced in".

You always want every person on the table to call you.
Period.

Always.


There are situations where it is possible to contruct hands that other people are holding such that you are in fact not getting your money in good (that you have less than your fair share of equity in the pot) but those situations are so rare, and are so contrived that it's sort of useless to think about.

Get them all in there.
Rinse repeat.

However, if you find your self in a pot somehow that is a HUGE portion of your BR (for some reason..) there are times when it can be better off to not have as many people in the pot because when you lose you actually hinder your future ability to make money.
That shouldn't really ever happen though unless you are shot taking, you happen to triple up, and while you are looking for rack and you get dealt Aces and now you've got 25% of your bank roll on the table.

A slightly silly counter example. I am all in with aces. Four ppl are all in with 23 and four with 45o. If someone has say TT, I want him folding. But in any practical situation I probably want everyone calling

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At live low stakes, limp raising AA amazingly still works. I think that if players will call your limp raise or re raise your limp raises it's a great play. At an aggressive table, I'd rather limp raise because I can build a huge pot pre flop and I don't want to raise to 15, get 5-6 callers, and have to play OOP, which commonly happens. i don't like to get fancy with aces, and I prefer to open raise or re raise with them, but if there are a couple of aggressive folks behind raising every hand pre flop, I'm going for that check raise and looking to build a monster pot.


First, limp re raising would turn your hand face up against better opponents, but H describes two situations where he got the perfect result: all in pre flop with AA.

If you're on a bank roll consideration, big pairs are going to win the pot more often against one or two opponents, so if you don't like variance, HU or three way should be your goal, and with KK, that's probably more true bc an over card can hit. But if you like money, then getting it in preflop w AA against as many opponents as possible is a good thing. Even if your chances of winning the pot drop to 40% against a large field of Vs, the large pot means your expected profit will be more.

The goal in poker is not to remove variance. It's to put yourself in jeopardy at favorable odds. With AA, with a ton of Vs, you may be a dog against the field but you still have the most equity of any player and want that larger pot.

In my OP, I said that l/r with aces is a bad habit, I didn't say anything like never limp aces, never, never, ever. I said it was something to be done only when it makes sense. It might make sense on sticky tables where they aren't giving up front open-reaises as much respect as they should.

Yeah, if you have some maniac raise-monkey behind you, then it's fine, though I'd prefer a seat change to get behind him so's I could 3! his habitual raises with aces. The last time I l/r pocket aces I had a degen gambler limp in from UTG, and I figured a l/r would get him all confused, and it worked. He stacked off with pocket nines. He wouldn't stuff it in if I had just raised instead of taking a chance that the open would come from behind me, and I could re-pop after the degen guy called. These are extraordinary situations.

You're better off open-raising with aces since there are so many players these days who like to put you on AK, and will call down a value bet on every street if the board doesn't produce an ace or king. It's not a bad strategy, and I've done it myself, but, again, it has to be an UTG opener I can range very narrowly. They don't understand this and try to snap off Big Slick way too often, and in situations where it clearly doesn't make much sense: "Kyuubimon open-raised, I call with Q7-off" (Yeah, this actually happened when I put in the first pop with KQ-suited, got my c-bet called, and checked through to the river and the fish actually complained when his Q-7-off took a tiny pot with a flopped second pair. "Why didn't you bet the turn? Why didn't you bet the river?" He actually said that. He didn't realize he'd gotten lucky and that I had the kind of hand he expected. Against most of my opening range from MP-2 he'd've been paying off like an ATM when I value bet him every step of the way.) Never mind that Kyuubimon opened from MP-2 where his range is a lot wider than from UTG. We're talking players who think "range" means an appliance for cooking, or wide open spaces where cowboys work with cattle and "equity" has something to do with real estate.

Yeah, Doyle wrote about l/r with aces from early positions in Super System, but what they forget (that reading comprehension thingie again) was it was in the context of the early rounds of a slow action tournament. Doyle certainly did not discuss it as a strategy for cash game play.

To reiterate: l/r with pocket aces is a tactic that is player/table dependent, and to be used carefully. It isn't something one should be doing routinely.

I'm mostly grunching this thread, but....

Limp/re-raising. It's a fine tactic. People will convince themselves that you're making a play. Especially if you've been somewhat active, that's all people will notice, activity. limp-re-raising just continues that story. And then...when the hand is over they will say ..."damn, I knew you had aces, damn". In short, yes it's obvious, but no one cares. It's a great way to dial in your desired SPR for getting it in post-flop.

And while getting more chips in pre-flop is desirable, and almost any SPR is good for aces.....another concern is what kind of SPR will your opponent's need to stack off with a worse hand,? and that's where limp re-raising becomes super powerful. You can use it set your opponents up to make a major blunder.

If you limp/call, or raise and get called for say $15 in a 1/2 game, and you're playing stacks $300 deep, your opponent isn't getting it in post flop without something that beats you. But if you limp, get raised to $15, re-raise to $50, and get called, now your opponent will stack off with over pairs and top pairs pretty easily.

Every single person, every time.

LDO.

Obvious thread is obvious. If you have come up with a different answer here you are either:

A. Way underrolled to play any level of poker.

Or:

B. Have such leaks in your game that you would make more money betting tails on a two headed coin than playing poker.

Or:

C: You hate money.

Personally, I LIKE money.

From an EV perspective yes the more the merrier. But we can't answer the risk averse part for you. If you are plAying for fun and have say one buy in and getting your AA cracked sends you home to the wife sooner than either of you prefer then maybe you want it all in 1 or two ways for less variance. But that's not a strat question (although a legit question) and this is a strat forum.

I think many results oriented players forget that while their odds of winning a 9 handed pot go down with AA, so does their opponents. Sure you might only be like 30% to win a hand, but if your opponent is 2% then of course you're going to take that edge.

i understand how you would the entire table to call but id prefer no more than 5. its pretty unrealistic to ever get more than 3 or 4 callers anyway unless your at the best table ever. even if you ever get 4 callers itd be pretty likely they have each others outs either with them having the same hand like your AA vs AK KK QQ QQ

I seriously can't believe we are having a debate about this?

Garrick/venice/ldo already said it.

Assume 100$ stacks at ten handed tabled.

We open ship 100 UTG with AA.

We can haz 1 caller with ~80% equity in a 200 pot

Or

We can has 9 callers and with ~15% equity ( I'm just guestimating here on AA v 9 hands) in a 1k pot

Obvs -100 for our eeevee

This seems more a question for the beginner's forum or maybe the theory forum. Obviously, you want everyone to call. This is Equity 101.