Big Pot + Big Hand

AA lose a lot of value going 4 ways to the flop, which is gonna happen a lot based on your read.

3 bet pre. AP raise flop. Reevaluate if UTG 3 bets otf, but most likely reraise. Even if villain has specifically KT you have lots of redraw outs to a boat. If villain calls (or calls your reraise), barrel ott and otr (if you haven’t gotten it all in yet).

Do NOT slowplay in spots like these. Passive villains will not build pots for you. You have to do it yourself. You should be trying to get money in the middle at every opportunity in a spot like this. As your title says - big hand, big pot. You have to make it big.

I know “they always fold when I bet my big hands”. Well first off that probably isn’t true. They sometimes fold when you bet your big hands. They don’t always fold. You will make more with those hands by betting than slow playing over the long run. If they do “always fold”, or more accurately, over fold, the adjustment is not to slowplay big hands, but rather to bet more aggressively with a wider range. Bet for thin value more and bluff more if they over fold. If they think you are bluffing more, they will also be more likely to pay off your big hands.

That isn’t really true. It is true that you will win with AA significantly less often when multi-way. Your EV doesn’t actually decrease from that (although your variance will increase). The reason is that when you do win, you will tend to win more money when multi-way than when heads up. A lower equity with a larger pot can translate into a higher EV. Of course it is dependent on how the rest of the hand plays out.

As an extreme example, suppose you are playing with a table of complete morons. One moron will always shove PF and the rest will call. Compare having AA against 8 such opponents Bs heads up with one. (Assume 100bb stacks for all players)

Heads up AA Bs ATC has about 85% equity. You either win 100bb or lose 100bb. EV is thus 0.85x100-0.15x100= 70BB

AA vs 8 villains with ATC has an equity of about 34%. This time though you win 800bb when you win, but still lose 100 when you don’t. Your EV in this case is 0.34x800 - 0.66x100 = 206bb.

Admittedly this is an extreme and unrealistic example, but the point is that lowering equity by allowing multi-way pots may not lower, but instead increase EV. That said, in this spot a PF 3 bet is certainly correct. I’m not arguing otherwise.

I get your point, I guess I was thinking more in terms of hero is gonna be losing more value with AA if it goes 4 ways.
Because, MW pots are much harder to play.
Because his gonna use his standart sizings.
And Because his gonna (as most people do) get too attached to his hand postflop (won't be able to go) and this is worse in 4 way pots then HU pots.

Of course it’s a 3 bet PF. But in an ideal world, your 3 bet would get multiple callers and in a truly perfect one, you would get all in pre Bs multiple callers. When you have the best hand, you want as much money in the pot as possible. Sure, you won’t win as often but you will win more when you do win.

Consider this (admittedly far-fetched) hypothetical. You are in a casino and you are watching the roulette table. The dealer for some reason pays off bets on 0 at 40-1 instead of the 35-1 he is supposed to pay. All other bets are correctly paid. What should you bet on? You should bet on 0 of course. This is true even though you are a 37-1 dog, while a bet on black, red, odd or even is almost a 50/50 shot (actually 9/19 on an American wheel). The bet on 0 is +EV; all other bets are -EV.

The point is not that we shouldn’t 3 bet or that we should be trying to keep more players in the hand when we have AA. The point is that multi-way is not really harming us in the long run. If you go 3-way you will win twice as much when you win, but you will not lose twice as often as you would heads up.

I think the problem with realizing this is that we mentally aren’t treating a premium hand like AA as a gambling proposition, but rather as a sure thing. We are basically counting our chips when we see AA dealt to us. It seems particularly devastating then when our aces do get beat. We tend to think therefore that anything that increases the odds of having our aces cracked must be bad for us. That just is not the case though. It certainly is higher variance and can be more difficult to play AA multi-way, but that does not mean that playing multi-way necessarily decreases EV. Like anything in poker, it os situational. There likely are spots where being multi-way is bad for EV. It just is not generally true.

It does decrease EV though, for all the reasons we've mentioned. You keep saying it doesn't but it does. Failure to 3b here dramatically decreases the overall EV of this combo. This is not an abstraction, it's just how the game distributes EV.

GTOw

AA is ~12.5bb to call and ~15.5 to raise. That's a 3bb decrease in a 4bb pot which is huge.

And that's gto v gto. That's before we account for all the extra EV we make on top by magnifying villain's mistakes through exploit lines in lower spr spots (cbetting, stationing etc). We are basically burning EV away calling here. I don't think it's equivocal at all.

Also note, some of the lower combos like QQ it's more nuanced -- now the EV is effectively identical so gto mixes. These combos will very often be outkickered and not extract as much raw value as an OP will. They require smaller pots to realise equity because when the money goes in we're rarely ecstatic.

But the top of our range is missing out too much when we trap premium hands in straightjackets. To the extent it becomes distinctly -EV to ignore. At least this is my understanding of preflop

I think you misunderstood my point. Failure to 3 bet decreases EV. IÂ’m not arguing that. The 3 bet results in larger pot size on average than calling does. That is obviously favorable for AA. But, does getting a 3 bet called by multiple villains decrease EV? IÂ’m not sure solvers can answer that question unequivocally; solvers are generally only accurate in heads up spots (That is my understanding - I could be wrong). In any case, these are two separate questions. I never said we shouldnÂ’t 3 bet. I agree entirely; we are torching EV by calling. IÂ’m h just pointing out that while 3-betting makes multi-way less likely that reducing the likelihood of a multi-way pot is not necessarily why 3 betting increases EV. The pot size increase is - the pot size heads up after a 3 bet will be, on average, larger than the size after calling and going multi-way. My contention is that if we 3 bet and get multiple callers, our EV will be higher than if we 3 bet and get only 1 caller, although in practice it might be more difficult to actually extract all of our EV on later streets with the more complex situation of being multi-way.

See my extreme example above. LetÂ’s modify it a bit. You are first to act with AA and must either fold or shove. There are 8 random hands. You of course shove, but you get to pick how many hands you want to be called by (assume that the specific hand or hands that call are randomly chosen). Are you picking one? You shouldnÂ’t. I havenÂ’t worked the math for all possibilities but I did for 8 callers above - your EV with 8 callers is much higher than with 1.

When you see someone open 2.4bb its almost never a rec
Calling pre makes sense only when there is someone 3betting like crazy behind you.
Flop and turn are also too passive, river is quiet thing when we lose to 20 combos of str8s and both of them can have it.

trapping increas only our ev when you have crazy aggro guys behind. With a passive station it does not make much sense often you will also get cold calls to your 3b from this kind of players with broadways or pocket pair type hands. Nice that you try to think out of the box this will be very important in the long run.

Ok I think I get what you guys are saying here. So in this instance, money did go into the pot which is great, but usually this won't happen because these guys are too passive. From passive or stations we get lots of value by betting and probably raising the flop.

As played, is there any possibility of getting away from this hand? Villain ended up having KTs which just gutted me lol

See Hz93 post above.