The idea comes from the
rock - a/k/a: the weak tight guy who will never get over how bad his luck is - who just lost a huge pot with AA; it was capped seven ways preflop,capped four ways on the flop, 3-bet on the turn and checked down on the river - with our rock last to act - because the off-suit deuce scared him. While a scare card like this one would scare any good player when added to a rainbow board of . . . K - 9 - 7 - 4 it turns out in this instance he had reason for pause; the deuce did indeed turn him into toast while making an easy winner out of - drumroll please . . . the ever popular K-2 off.
As he walks out to his car, the car he bought with the money he made of tourists who routinely play K-2, and drives home to his apartment which he pays for with money donated by those same tourists he vows to author a post on the 2+2 forum entitled, "AA + 7 opponents = toast".
I hope that answered your question.
The more useful - and less sarcastic answer/explanation is . . .
AA does lose some value when facing large fields IF the hands it's facing are quality holdings being played by solid players; if instead of this you have 6+ opponents playing virtually random cards your expectaion goes up with every additional call - specifically preflop but theoretically on every betting round. That said, there is a nightmare scenario for AA, or for any big pair.
If you run AA against three or four pocket pairs and one or two suited connectors it can get ugly.
While AA will still win a huge amount of $ in this matchup if there were no post-flop betting the fact is there IS action after the flop and this action will in no way benefit AA if a 3rd Ace does not hit the board and will often hurt it even when it does make a set.
It's not a complicated concept; Mike Caro once wrote an article entitled "Everyone in the world is playing poker" in which he depicted this in a crystal clear manner. I seem to recall him also describing an hypothetical hand in which KK flops a set and on the flop - in spite of the fact that KK is ahead - it has less than a 5% chance of winning the hand. Three flopped sets and two 15-out draws leave only the fourth King or a running pair as his outs and given that some of those running pairs make a straight flush for one of the drawing hands even these are not "clean" outs.
I shall now be lambasted by the masses for the length of this post as well as the fact that by failing to read every post in this thread I may have missed the one where (gulp) this question was already answered.
Oh well, as dad always said, "f--k'em if they can't take a joke".
Send me a private message if you need further clarification of the "AA = toast" concept.
Bye now -
|