Sometimes you live to fight another day.

I've seen a guy fold AA in 3-way all in pot in front of him. He showed me his hand and folded after thinking about it for a minute. The reason? He had built a massive stack over many hours, playing with many of the same players and didn't want want to risk it all in one hand against 3, yes, 3 all ins in front of him, two which had him covered. Worse for him, as he had showed me his hand, the dealer took it and showed the table, to the stunned look of the others, illustrating his fear of losing his stack with a massive payday possible.

It was getting late, play was getting looser and more wild and he didn't want to risk it all against so many while it took him a dozen hours to build his stack, even as he was a favourite. As it were, he should probably had left the game as he wasn't comfortable with the risk at that point.

As fate would have it, if I recall correctly, it was QQ vs KK vs KK. A queen came on the flop and this guy would have been stacked.

Immediately after that hand and him celebrating his lay down, he stacked up and left (wise decision). Probably admiring himself on the way home for his ability to pay his rent now. It's certainly a much different situation than you faced, but nonetheless, sometimes one hand is just one hand of hundreds you might play in a night, sometimes prudence is the better part of valour.

Cool story bro

Agree that overall, the proportion of threads about "should I fold KK preflop" is high relative to how frequent this decision needs to be deployed. It's an emotional moment.

It is worth assessing the meaning of preflop 4-bets and other rare strong bets from patient players with big stacks. I'd guess that if you play fairly tight, when you 3-bet KK the probability of facing a non-trivial 4 bet is about 1 in 20. If you have KK, the probability someone else has AA is about 1 in 22.

^ so if I play 2000 hours at 30 hands an hour, that's 60,000 hands, I will get KK about (roughly) every 221 hands (same as the chances of holding AA in any given hand), that comes to about 272 holdings of KK on average.

Of those 272 times, Man of Means posits that there is a one in 22 chance that KK will be <AA (IF the "1 in 22" is correct) is about 12 times KK<AA.

12 times in 60,000 hands is once every 5,000 hands (166 hours).

That's pretty close to the foregoing estimate.

My mileage must vary.

Gross spot. In theory, I think this is a fold, but in practice, I'm probably flatting the 4bet and then calling off my stack on any non-Ace board.