Played AA Poorly

I'm curious about what CO had. I'd guess he didn't have much.
On that flop, maybe AXs or something like TT or 99 with a heart. So, he would fold to almost any bet OTT.
He could, of course, have a weak K (KT-KJo or K9s), but with that holding, I don't see a fish folding to a cbet OTT.

I am really not seeking advice about limping Aces.

You should be. At least in my opinion.
Once you have a decent sample of limped AAs, it would be interesting to compare that to the hands that have been raised.

If you now filter for situations where the pot is unopened and you limped with AA, how big sample you have and what is your winrate in that situation so far?

I will assume you have a very polarized limp/3bet range preflop. It is either AA-QQ, AK, sometimes AQ, or hands like A8s-A2s, K8s-K4s, Q8s-Q6s.
I really don't know what is the doubt here. Both flop and turn bets are ok. You want to put the money in asap and you have a super polarized range.
He should call any strong Kx (AK, KQ, KJ) and hands that floated the flop (J♥:T♥:, A♥:Q♥:, A♥:J♥: ). You won't guess if he has anything or not.

Not sure why you would limp with 4 passive players behind you. I expect only the MP+1 could isolate you with a wide range, but I expect you will play often a multi way pot if you limp here. As played you can easy 3bet like 15bb with a raise and a call in front of you for value.

The rest seems alright with in the end a shove on the turn for 3/4 pot.

Cheers,
SDK1987

Originally posted by la55i

I am really not seeking advice about limping Aces.

You should be. At least in my opinion.
Once you have a decent sample of limped AAs, it would be interesting to compare that to the hands that have been raised.

If you now filter for situations where the pot is unopened and you limped with AA, how big sample you have and what is your winrate in that situation so far?

Yeah, I would like to see HM manager picture about it.

I did some quick analysis on this. Luckily I had some guys in my database that had the tendency to open limp AA

First I analyzed how I am doing when I raise AA pre. I looked at the scenario where I open raise and villains either fold or call, in those cases I was winning with AA about 300 bb/100 if I remember correctly. Then I took a look at the cases where we face further action postflop. For those hands I got a sample size of 337 hands with winrate of 795.4 bb/100.

Then I combined an alias of some decent players in my database, the total hand sample was about 2 million hands.

When someone limped pre-flop with AA and villain just called or folded, in those cases they were actually losing almost -100bb/100. That was slightly over 100 hand sample though. When they faced further action (villain iso-raised and they got the chance to 3bet, as they usually plan to do) they managed to get a winrate of 555,5 bb/100. That was over 184 hands.
But when they raised and got no action, the winrate was around 300bb/100. And when they raised and got further action, the winrate was 820,1 bb/100 over 4333 hands.

As I said, I did this quickly. And my filtering sucked because I had to separate the scenarios where we get a chance to re-raise preflop or not. And I would like to note that the sample size for the limps is very very small. However, so far it looks like raising AA pre-flop was significantly better strategy. And in my opinion this shouldn't surprise us. There must be a reason why no coaches or experienced players advice to limp with any hands, except in some special situations. This is also why we got only a couple of hundred hands in the limping sample but over 4k hands in the raising sample.

in all fairness, there is a sample bias due to the players doing the limp-raising with AA being almost unanimously weak players.
as played there's not much to say, if i limped for the lulz i would squeeze bigger, and on the flop you have to decide whether to go for a two streets or three streets betsizing plan

Originally posted by Tomaloc
in all fairness, there is a sample bias due to the players doing the limp-raising with AA being almost unanimously weak players.

Just to make sure I understood correctly: you say that the results are skewed because the guys limping are often bad, and the results would be more comparable if we had a sample of good players limping?

I do agree with that. However, it is very difficult to find a decent sample where good players have limped their AA. And I believe there is a reason for that. I do not have the data to prove anything, but I strongly believe that raising AA pre-flop is a superior strategy.

Originally posted by zetozinho
I will assume you have a very polarized limp/3bet range preflop. It is either AA-QQ, AK, sometimes AQ, or hands like A8s-A2s, K8s-K4s, Q8s-Q6s.
I really don't know what is the doubt here. Both flop and turn bets are ok. You want to put the money in asap and you have a super polarized range.
He should call any strong Kx (AK, KQ, KJ) and hands that floated the flop (J♥:T♥:, A♥:Q♥:, A♥:J♥: ). You won't guess if he has anything or not.

Your guess is somewhat accurate. My limp/3bet range is QQ+. I don't limp/3bet AK but I do call 3 bets with AK. I raise All In with QQ+ if facing a 3bet. I don't call 3bets with any other cards. AK is actually the only hand that I will open raise, because I don't mind calling a 3bet with AK. I don't open raise other hands, except maybe strong hands in the button because I don't like facing 3bets and folding because of my very narrow 3bet call range. By limping, I reduce the chances of facing a 3bet. I limp/call up to 8BB for my other starting hands (VPIP 15%). Now let me emphasize. This is full ring. My limping strategy cannot work for shorthanded play. Also, I do not consider Villain’s range because Ignition is an anonymous site where it really is not possible to know your Villain. Thus, my preflop play is quite generic.

Originally posted by la55i

I am really not seeking advice about limping Aces.

You should be. At least in my opinion.
Once you have a decent sample of limped AAs, it would be interesting to compare that to the hands that have been raised.

If you now filter for situations where the pot is unopened and you limped with AA, how big sample you have and what is your winrate in that situation so far?

Ok. I was going to wait a year before presenting these statistics. Always limping AA should be carefully scrutinize with a much larger sample size. I set PokerTracker to analyze starting hands of AA, where the First Action Opportunity was to limp, and my first Preflop Action was to Call. I also set PokerTracker to view identical settings but my first PreFlop Action was to Raise. During the 54 hands that I limped AA, my bb/100 is 2,122. During the 10 hands that I raised AA, my bb/100 is 1,647. I would like to know other players’ raised AA stats. My ten raised AA are obviously insufficient. Also, the 54 limped hands are not enough of a sample. Now if you guys do this, make sure it is for Full Ring.

Yea the sample sizes are veryvery small. I still think you shouldn't try this strategy for a year because I believe it to be inferior on the long run.

where the First Action Opportunity was to limp, and my first Preflop Action was to Call.

I didn't quite understand what you meant with that. Did you filter for hands where you limped, faced a raise and called that?

Originally posted by la55i
Yea the sample sizes are veryvery small. I still think you shouldn't try this strategy for a year because I believe it to be inferior on the long run.

where the First Action Opportunity was to limp, and my first Preflop Action was to Call.

I didn't quite understand what you meant with that. Did you filter for hands where you limped, faced a raise and called that?

With my first Action, I could limp and did limp. No, it is an excellent idea to try this for a year. Then, our forum community can compare results. Then we will KNOW whether the strategy is sound.

The problem with limping is that 1) the pot often stays much smaller than in raised pots 2) you invite many players to the pot which makes your equity smaller. When everyone joins the pot with crappy hands, you get beat by random 2pari, straights flushes etc. 3) all decent players know to fold very often vs limp/3bet lines.

I also ran the analysis with a sample size that was 6 times larger than what you have now. Although you might be playing those limped AAs more wisely than the guys in my sample size. And the player pool was different.

If you want to try this for a year, it is ok for me, but I really much doubt that the profits will be larger
Then you actually need to raise the AAs for the second year and we can only then compare the results. So we will have to wait for a loong time