Help me break my addiction...

[TripleQ]

... to limping with AA.

I generally find myself limping with AA UTG or UTG+1 more often than not. Under ideal circumstances, this usually pays off quite well, or atleast I get all the chips in with a big edge and have a bad beat story. Ideal circumstances being a relative aggressive table, not many unraised pots, players who are paying attention and will fold their raise to a limp reraise. I'd lean towards doing this with a huge and deep stack, hoping to bust a short stack, or with a middling (10-15BB stack) vs a table of big stacks hoping to double up. Short stack (<10BB) I'd probably push, hoping for a caller thinking I was desperate.

However, with an average stack, I'd probably standard 3-4xBB raise because I'm not looking to gamble nor am I looking to pull a low risk bust on someone else.

Just curious what other people's thoughts are with AA UTG or UTG+1 mid tournament. It's a volatile play for me for sure.

[BobbyTheG]

Something I read recently was by Dan Harrington on this topic. Your options are to raise 3.5x or to limp and hope to get action behind you. What Harrington does to vary his play is he uses a random number generator. So first, decide how often you want to limp vs. raise in this situation. Let's say it's 75% raise vs. 25% limp. What you can do is look at the second hand of your watch. If it's between second 1 and 45, raise. If it's between 46-60 limp. Kind of a cool way to vary your play and not fall into traps of playing hand the same way. I do this with a 80/20 split (48 seconds vs. 12 seconds) from UTG with AA. Whaddaya think?

[MLG]

I like how you play it, and play it the same way. The only times I'm careful are when I'm big and deep, and the other aggressive players are also big and deep. I don't want to be in a situation where the other stack call comfortably call me limp reraise in position and then take the pot away on a dangerous flop, or have incredibly large implied odds to flopping a monster.