Re: Preflop raise amount
FYP=Fixed Your Post
On the subject, I feel that one needs to use a raise size that works well for the game they're sitting in (obvious, yes?). If nobody will notice that you raise more with AA (and will call with trash), by all means do so.
In a more practical vein, my standard is 4BB with 0-1 limpers and 3BB+1 per limper for more limpers. In the blinds, I'll raise pot+1BB. I find this tends to have the effect I want in the games I play. Will it work for everyone? Maybe, maybe not. If it doesn't, find something that does.
As far as the evolution of that goes, I used to do a 3BB+1 method but found the BB came in more often than I wanted him to when I opened for 3BB and nobody else called so I bumped it up a little. However, raising 5BB felt wrong when there was 1 limper so only raised 4BB in that case. With more limpers, 3BB+1 seems to work well. I don't raise much out of the blinds when there are a boatload of limpers but I've found pot+1BB works better as an amount than pot did so that's what I've been using. If that changes, I'll probably tweak those amounts again.
In my opinion, the most important thing is that the raise amounts don't tell you anything about my hand. You might infer that I have a premium hand when I raise out of the blinds into a large field as I don't do it often (and you'd usually be right) but it costs you too much preflop to outdraw me (particularly as I don't automatically stack off sets with my overpairs and every once in a while, I'll show down something completely different).
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