Mike Caro: The truth about AA. Limit

He's not wrong.

Only read as "Despite common advice, you do not want to raise with aces" without the "in order to chase players out of the pot before the flop in hold'em" does it really become a debatable topic.

I think it's position dependent - position is everything. UTG when I raise aces I want to see a lot of folds and (ideally) the blinds calling me with their naked aces. I don't want to be out of position in a family pot with an unimproved overpair on a drawy board.

On the button when I raise I want 8 callers and CO to 3bet so I can cap and have position on the flop in a big pot.

In my opinion. I don't think he's advocating against a raise. Read the language Carefully. He's saying "the objective of raising with aces is NOT to chase out the other guys." You still want to raise, but with the objective of bloating the pot.

So, on a table full of tight scaredies? A limp, Loose wild gambooolers? A raise from early or even a limp re-raise from early. 3 guys in front of you limped? a raise from the button.

That last example is where I've often struggled. With huge multiway pots, i've often been welling to play my aces for set value with family pots. This makes me willing to maybe think about it in another way.

It all comes down to your equity edge. Preflop you have a huge edge against any number of players, so you benefit more for each dollar that goes into the pot while you are that far ahead.

Position is nice to have and will net you more profit postflop (ie, being able to check behind or raise to push our draws as needed), but being out of position still shows a huge profit with aces.

The way i take it is that with AA you dont want to just win the blinds because AA will win the majority of the time. I think i heard sklansky talk about this on the first 2+2 poker broadcast in the "sklansky minute".

More specifically im trying to get 1 or 2, MAX 3 (though thats when i begin to get scared) customers, not 0 or 3+.

Specific examples being raise from UTG or very EP as you have no benefit of position for the hand. Maybe open limping in later position if your opening the pot and there are no customers yet, and raising in late to last positions if there are already several people in the pot.

On the other hand Im pretty sure we all agree the most profitable situations with aces are when another person wakes up with a second best monster preflop (KK, AK, QQ) and you can get tons of value. Limping can potentially offset that value, so i pretty much limit limping AA to situations when im in LP and noone has entered the pot yet.

what is best in the long run?

In a multiway pot, yes bullets might only win half the time. But that means they win half the time.. A vast improvement on the ~10-20% each other hand will win the pot.

Over slightly less than 10K hands with PT (just got PT, I don't know why I've first got it now (I'm a cheapskate!)) I've only won about 52% of my hands with AA ( Shocked

WTF!?!). So at low-limit HE nobody's folding even if you announce you're holdig aces (might try it)

Is that a normal winrate with Aces? And how many BB's are you people up with Aces?

Well, the percentage will be inversely proportional to the average number of players who hang around in the hand. "The more the suckier." I think a more normal rate is in the 70-75% range. I ran 75% in the last month (a tiny sample size but it worked out...however my KK rate has been 28% and that is NOT normal).

Over my last 25k hands, I held Aces 135 times and won 78.52% of them.

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Mike Caro: The truth about AA. Limit

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Mike Caro: The truth about AA. Limit