3/5 NL
Hero about 750 eff. w/AA in the BB.

UTG raises to 25.
5 players call.
Hero makes it 140.
4 players call. About 600 in the pot after rake.
Flop is 7 high w/ 2 clubs, Hero has Ac.
SB checks, hero thinks for a minute, counts his chips, only has about a pot sized bet left. Hero shoves. Folds around to SB who snap calls. Hero, of course gets snapped off by a set of 7s.

Is there any way I avoid going broke here? Should I have played it differently? If so, How? Or is this just a case of run-bad where the hands played themselves?

As played you cant do anything different than stackoff. SPR is so small and a 7 high board is the better we can get, just unlucky someone flopped a set on you. With just a pot sized bet ish behind this is a standard go broke spot/ride the variance train.

That being said, this need to be bigger preflop with all the callers in between here. I would make it around 200 here for fat value, and stackoff on any flop if called.

Like 140 is what i would make it if the opener had 2-3 callers, and here we have 5 people putting in 25 each. Bigger pre here for sure.

I would edit out results. I’d raise to $200 pre — I default to 4x + 1x per caller out of position. As played jamming seems fine because you’ll get called by smaller overpairs.

I don't know why your calling this "run bad" because you lost a hand. You can't win every hand, or expect to win every time you have aces. Just reload and go onto the next hand.

Don’t even give this a second thought. You played it fine. This is why we have bankroll management.

Thanks man, but I've been around long enough to have my Aces cracked a time or two. I know that's part of the game. I'm strictly asking if I could've done anything to lose less on this particular hand, or if given the situation, I'm just destined to go broke. What I did or didn't do after the hand is irrelevant. I do appreciate the two gentlemen above you who criticized my pre-flop bet sizing. That's the kind of information I was looking for.

I understand that but I'm trying to correct your thinking and you're thinking trumps the line you used in the hand. That hand played itself you lost and nothing you could have done better. But the issue of calling this one particular hand "run bad" could hurt your game in the long run. For example when you get aces you shouldn't get entitlement that you should automatically win the hand especially when you play much deeper, and there are a lot of times we have to fold aces post flop without a 2nd thought.

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Way too small preflop. 25 and 5 callers? You could get away with 250 here.

I mean there’s no strategy to discuss on flop. Jam it home. Usually they don’t have a set.

But preflop is the problem. You need to make it way more OOP. Like my default is 4x whatever the open is. Then add one more for each caller

In this case, it’s 4 for the open + 5 callers = 9x. 25 x 9 = 225. I’ll add an extra 25 as a stupid tax for the field.


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Yeah, I considered raising bigger, but the game wasn't actually playing as loose as this hand makes it sound. The UTG raiser and the SB were very competent players. The other callers were less competent, but not complete fish. I was torn between trying to get some value and being stuck OOP in a multi-way pot like I was. I thought my hand was basically face-up and the good player UTG could find a fold, and if he folds, and the next guy folds, then maybe it folds around or I only get one caller and the SB can probably fold too because he's in worse position than me. But once UTG and the next player call, then everyone else is priced in. I'm pretty confident that if I make it $200-250, everyone would've folded and I'd be missing some value. But I guess I just overthought it and should've been happy to take down the $150 that was out there.

Yeah, with $150 in the middle I'm thrilled to take it down pre. Everyone calling in the first place was a mistake, and now if they call your $250 bet it's an even bigger mistake. I always make this point, but the average winrate with AA is on the order of 5-10 BB per hand. Taking down 30 BB here is a great outcome.

If everyone folds for 200, nice for you that they will fold their equity when you are doing this with hands like AQ or AK or like a KQ suited.

Think about how this will work with your whole range, not just the actual hand you got dealt this time.

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Not to mention I find this hard to believe when 140 got 4 callers. Highly doubt OP gets no customers if he makes it 250.


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I play 1/2, but I'm curious why no one wants to shove out of position. The pot is $150, so why just make it $750 to go -- five times the pot. If you get a caller or two, great. If they all fold that's fine, too. I agree that just a bigger sizing and shove most flops works too. But is it that much worse to just go all in expecting to take down $150 say 2/3 of the time, and get a caller the rest, with maybe a rare time you get two? I'd think the EV is not that different.

It is one of those things that works at 1/2 but generally doesn't work at bigger games.

3/5 players will usually have some sense of ranges and risk/reward balance even if they can't express those terms. They will understand that your risking your entire $750 stack to win the $150 in the pot. With a bunch of people in the pot the chance you run into a big pair is high. Shoving will only make money if hero has a big pair and the occasional move with AK. This results in it only get called with really good hands.

People at 1/2 generally don't understand those things. You will see people shoving too wide and making spazz shove bluffs without concern for stack sizes. These still get called too often because the other people at the table don't understand those things either.

I think shoving for 750 is pretty bad here. Like, we do have AA in a dream spot and we do want some action if we can get it. But we cant give people a good price to suckout on us. We want to give people a chance to make a calling mistake (by making it 200-250), and we also want to give people a chance to shove themself pre with a worse hand.

If we shove we put people up against the wall with noe other options than calling off their entire stack, and we might get more hero folds than we want here.

The big thing here is that you didn't even run bad as played. AA vs. 4 random hands is only a 55% favorite. That's why you raise more pf.

If four people call our bet, our equity will be 0.55*($25+4*$140), or $322. If only one person calls our bet (and we have, say, an 80% chance of winning heads up), our equity will be 0.80*(3*$25+2*$140), or $284. Our """EV""" is higher when we get more callers for a certain bet size.

Our percent chance of winning the hand goes down with more callers, but that doesn't mean we want fewer callers, since the size of the pot grows enough to make up for it. (Saying we should raise more to increase our chances of winning the hand sounds dangerously close to *gasp* sacrificing EV to reduce variance).

And we can always realize our equity by never folding at this SPR (~1).

I guess my fundamental question here is how non optimal is going all in our of position with 6 opponents. It feels wrong to make a small raise, as op did, because you’re creating a situation where you get multiple callers and are locked into shoving most flops since you’re oop. So you Often lose your stack a hand like 77 winds up getting 4-1 to flop a set, and wins another 4x when they do, so his odds are wrong but not hugely so (8-1, but sometimes he loses with the set). A bigger raise like $250, raises the price to catch up, and seems clearly correct. But you are more likely to get callers. So say a $90 raise (as played) gets 4 callers, a $200 raise gets 1.25 callers on average, and a $700 shove raise gets .5 .in position I choose the second path. Because I may be able to fold or trap someone who flops tptk or on a low flip with overpair or when an ace hits. But oop when I’m going to shove pretty much every flop, I don’t hate just taking down the $150. Leaving aside meta game considerations, am I really giving up much?

We aren’t just playing AA though. We’re playing all of our hands. Like sometimes we have TT and we’d like to knock the KJo of the world out of the pot.

OP’s math and action is confusing, but I’m operating on the number of callers being correct. When he makes it 140 over 25 and 5 callers, he’s offering UTG over 2.5:1 on a call. If he just defaults to “fold 0% v size”, he’s probably doing well versus this size. So we aren’t forcing mistakes by making him fold when he should continue, or continue when he should fold. Just like if we jam, we aren’t really forcing mistakes because everyone will just fold (unless UTG has like KK specifically, but we’d have gotten him anyway).

We should be playing strategies that give our opponents not obvious decisions. Like against 140, UTG can even be confused with a hand like JJ, and just call under the assumption that it will create a cascade of callers behind and that he can just set mine. Against a big 3 bet (1/3rd of our stack), he has to decide right now whether his hand is worth going broke with. Even if he just calls, he’s not folding JJ on 742tt

Plus there’s always the chance we make it 250 and get the same action, because live poker.


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Great answer, like your thinking.

Agree with everyone. You have to bet way more preflop. The pot is $150 before your action. After you make it $140, it costs the UTG $115 to see a pot with $290 in it, for about 2.5 to 1 pot odds. UTG is not likely to fold a typical UTG range for that price, and everyone after that gets better and better odds. In this situation, you need to go to at least $200.

Otherwise, nothing you can do. V flopped a set. It happens.

He should've raised more but this has absolutely nothing to do with why.

This isn't relevant to that point, but our chance of winning is actually higher than 55% because opponents will be forced to fold equity when we bet postflop. We probably actually win closer to 70% of the time vs 4 random hands, maybe more. The hands that do end up beating us won't even have enough equity on the flop to call profitably vs. AA. It's extremely rare to flop a hand with >1/3 equity vs. AA out of a random range. It's still fairly rare starting with a strong range.

This is not fine pre is way too small.

Standard sizing for an OOP 3 bet is 4x the raise size+dead money. Now with this much dead money, short stacks, etc, we can size down a bit but 140 is pretty small. $200 is a good number, but definitely at least go $175.

Not all 7 high flops are the same. If it was like a 7-4-2 flop yea we are always going broke. If it was 567...well now we need to start to figure stuff out...might still have to go broke though given SPR.