What is it with people over the past few days slow playing pocket aces and then whining like a small child who’s dropped his lollypop when they get cracked?

Now I’m expecting most of my readers will know this but AA is not invincible! Worse still the more people you let in for free/cheap the more chance that you’re dropping your lollypop.

According to the poker odds calculator at http://www.oddspoker.co.uk/Odds.html AA will win (give or take 1%):

85% of the time against one random opponent.
73% of the time against two random opponents.
63% of the time against three random opponents.
55% of the time against four random opponents.
49% of the time against five random opponents.
43% of the time against six random opponents.
38% of the time against seven random opponents.
34% of the time against eight random opponents.
and only 30% of the time against nine random opponents.

So what does all that mean? Well in a nutshell slow playing those aces is suicide. If you’re seeing the flop with four others you’re into coin flip territory, even with only 3 others you’ve lost a lot of your edge. More than four and you may as well be holding whatever the other players have.

You’re probably wondering where this little rant came from? Well in the past two days I’ve witnessed four separate hands where a player has slow played aces with between four and six callers. In each of these cases they ended up being beaten on the flop or the turn, going all in and drawing almost dead to the river and then abusing their opponents for poor play.

Usually this wouldn’t bother me as I want to see my opponents making these mistakes, but it is so frustrating to see them abusing others when it’s themselves that are to blame. So I thought I’d write this in the hope that any new players reading my blog won’t make similar mistakes, as for the players I witnessed these past couple of days… let them learn the hard (and expensive) way!

When you get your pocket aces, raise it up big and hope for one or two callers. Sure, sometimes you’ll scare everyone out of the pot but at least you’ll be getting the blinds instead of losing your stack. Also remember that even with two callers, you’re losing 27% of the time… suck it up, bear it and know you made the correct, long term profitable play.