Live MTT, 16 Players left, ICM Spot with AA

1)Yes.

2)If anything, under ICM with AA you should be more inclined to put more money in preflop, while you can be certain your hand is far ahead. ICM generally inclines us to keep pots small, but that's for close spots, which AA preflop is not. In addition, fold equity becomes more important under ICM, and I'm sure you can figure out what % of the time the button folds preflop when you flat.
Flatting is the worst thing you can do in this situation; you're putting yourself in position to play a pot out of position with a lot of money behind where it's going to be difficult to figure out if you're good on dangerous boards, or you might inadvertently fold the best hand to a thin river value bet (or even a value bet as good as TPTK). We only flat-call AA as a trap when we're shallow enough to get the rest in on the flop and we want to keep some of villain's preflop bluffs in, to get more money from a c-bet or to let him hit a piece he'll stack off with.

3)Not when you have AA.

4)Looks fine, although honestly you could go bigger when you're both this deep.

Even with ICM this is an ideal outcome for you. You're a huge favorite to win an enormous pot and have a massive chip lead. We want to play pots smaller when equities run closer and we don't want to risk bloating the pot with a marginal holding or draw on early streets. The nuts are never a hand where that strategy applies.

If you didn't have AA, you might not want to gii with the other big stack and your 3!s might be unbalanced. Therefore, you might want to generally flat with big hands. This also has the advantage that some short stack may shove or 4! and you can gii with them. It is obviously good to gii with AA though. The problem is your opponent might suspect you are only 3-betting AA/KK.

Is this post a joke? Hm you have AA and want to gii especially preflop if you can. Don’t even consider icm in this spot. It’s not like it’s a Satty with 9 left, you have all the chips and get it all in against 2nd place who can cripple your stack if you lose.

Yes you want to 3! This spot. Flatting a standard open seems terrible with AA; unless you are Like 100% sure someone behind can and will squeeze or something, almost always 3 bet this hand. Maybe can flat if you 3! To a normal size and follow 4 bets.

Agree with those who say no way you flat in this situation, and you WANT to play for stacks preflop with AA here.

That said, there are more times than Nath suggests that I think you should flat AA in big ICM spots. Nath is correct that you do this more with a substantially lower SPR where you are likely going to play for stacks at some point during the hand, but a pf shove has FE.

But adding AA to the pf flat range IP even with bigger SPR vs. an aggressive opener is often a smart play that maximizes your $EV. Also, flatting IP where the stacks are such that a shortish blind will be highly incentivized to shove over what looks like a lot of dead money in the pot also works well.

I think as a rule, though you never want to flat OOP; but IP there are some specific opportunities to do so.

Phill H. once said that in the early days he folded AA pre while deep cause ppl didn’t know what to do when being check raised postflop, so there was no need to risk entire stack pre. From what I’ve seen these times are already over and there’s no other way.

If Phil thinks he can afford to pass up an 82% chance to double his stack, he's overestimating his edge. Even in the WSOP Main.

This is a bad beat story. Lost to set.

However, this is a situation where you shouldn't 3! much and it is hard to be balanced.

Agree with the consensus - 3bet and get it in. The one nuance I would add is that being chip leader at 16 left with 62 ITM means your ICM pressure is almost entirely on others, not you. You are the one applying pressure by having chips. Flatting AA here to keep pots small actually reduces your ability to leverage that stack advantage. The only time flatting AA as chip leader makes sense is satellites with flat payouts - and this is not one.

So if folding AA and KK makes sense in that scenario, what hands DO you play? Or are you just saying folding up the ladder is the best play? That might buy you a couple spots, but if you want to actually win the tourney, I don’t see how you can pass up huge preflop advantages.

This isn't an ICM situation for me because the pay jumps are likely small here.

My sizing in the SB is usually 4x but because we are up against a huge stack I don't mind 3.5x

Flatting could be a potential disaster here because we would be giving the BB a lot of incentive to call. Our preflop chances then get reduced from 80% to 90% to 60% to 80%. And once the flop comes we would be OOP against 2 players, both with ranges that would be very wide.

I have no issue with getting it in with AA late in the tournament in the money when we know we are ahead (or at worst tied). In fact I like it a lot given we won't have to play OOP post flop against a big stack. It will work 80% of the time against a PP and ~90% against a big A. The bigger problem is that BTN may call IP with a SC and we may not realize that we are behind on flops that don't hit our range. Even on KQx, QJx, JTx flops where we can suspect Villain has 2 pair or a set it will be hard to not lose a lot of chips.

And I say all of this having lost a lot of huge pots all in with AA deep in the money with an 80%+ chance to win. In the end it will balance out over time where you will win key pre-flop all ins with a large edge.

He won the main event once, in 1989, in a field of 173 people, mostly pros. I am sure he was not folding AA preflop at any point.

So? I mean, that's true of anybody, if they somehow play so badly in between AA they're covered every single time they get dealt it.

But you definitely don't win tournaments passing up edges that big.

From this and your other posts, it seems like your main focus is avoiding bad beats, which is not a good way to play.

I like Phil but he was spinning bull**** of the purest ray serene there just to **** with some starstruck reporter.

3betcall

Only in donkaments would this even be a post.

3bet sizing is fine. Never flat jesus christ.

I could flat here as a trap if BB had a smaller stack size. 32BBs is too big to expect a significant shoving range, I'd like to see 15-25, depending on the player.

I have a rough heuristic for when I flat big hands, but it is more geared towards playing vs a 3!.

If the SPR will be 2 or less, I will flat AA (at least some of the time)
If the SPR will be 1 or less, I will flat KK. That is more image dependent, if I have a tight image I will flat there, if not I will just get it with KK as well.

Those heuristics also work well as the BB. It's great to have big hands in what will otherwise be a very weak range, ie defending the BB we are calling all sorts of hands.

Here, we are going to have an SPR of 7, which is just way too high to consider flatting. Add in the fact that we are CL and obviously cover the button, we should be 3!ing way more here, and this is just a dream scenario.

Exactly right on the stack size threshold. At 32bb the BB has enough behind to call a 3bet, see a flop, and make a decision. That means you're playing a bloated pot in position against a hand you have no info on, when you could just get it in clean preflop. The SPR heuristic is solid for cash, but at 16 players with meaningful pay jumps, I'd rather take the clean flip or domination spot than engineer a trap that requires postflop cooperation from a live player.