What is the best theoretical number of preflop callers to AA?

[Diboss]

For tight aggressive play, Abdul recommends limp-reraising with AA. Also note that that re-raise will more than likely eliminate a good 5+ players on a tight/slightly loose table. So I'm still saying he doesn't suggest you keep everyone along for the ride, as some of you seem to be saying.

[maurile]

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I disagree with your last statement in this case. With two or three callers you win more money. You'll win a higher percentage of hands, the goal will be to maximize the win percentage and the amount won. According to the statistics. That would be with 2 or 3 callers.

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I think you're reading the stats incorrectly. They show that you maximize your expectation on the pre-flop round of betting against 8 opponents, not 2 or 3.

To the person who mentioned that those win percentages assume that your opponents have random hands, that is correct, but aces play approximately the same way against random hands as they do against non-random hands. So I don't think that's a big deal.

Depending on how your opponents play after the flop, however, I agree that you'd probably rather have 5 or 6 callers instead of 8. AA is sort of a reverse-implied-odds hand. You are probably going to the river most of the time when you lose, but many of your opponents will not be going to the river when they lose. A higher win percentage will lessen the effect of this. So although you make the most money on your pre-flop bet against 8 opponents, you probably do better on your post-flop bets where fewer people saw the flop. I'm guessing five opponents would be near the optimum if they are decent players -- more than that if they are not.

Running a series of TTH sims might be the best way to answer this question. (Looking at results from PokerTracker would be better in theory, but I doubt even all of us combined would have a statistically significant sample of AA versus 6, 7, 8, or 9 opponents.)

[Stork]

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I disagree with your last statement in this case. With two or three callers you win more money. You'll win a higher percentage of hands, the goal will be to maximize the win percentage and the amount won. According to the statistics. That would be with 2 or 3 callers. Let's also not forget that with the times we lose with many callers, there's a likelihood that we'd have put more money in the pot (because most people figure their aces CAN'T lose) than in the situations where we do hold up. What I'm saying is that on average (I think) we lose more when we overplay AA against many callers than we win when it holds up.

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Against 2 opponents, AA wins 75% of the time. Against 8 opponents, AA wins 35% of the time, alittle bit less than half as often, but there are 4x as many opponents, meaning 4x more money. 35% of 4 is much greater than 75% of 1...

[pudley4]

I was searching for something, came acress this post, and had to respond.

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For tight aggressive play, Abdul recommends limp-reraising with AA. Also note that that re-raise will more than likely eliminate a good 5+ players on a tight/slightly loose table. So I'm still saying he doesn't suggest you keep everyone along for the ride, as some of you seem to be saying.

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This is absolutely wrong. The reason to limp-reraise with AA is to get more money in the pot. You are not going to be knocking out players with the limp-reraise, you will be getting them to put in 3 or more bets preflop when you have a big advantage over them.

Abdul recommends limp-reraising in a tough game because raising first in will eliminate too many players.

[AngryCola]

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I doubt you could lose money playing low liimts and raise AA at every street and never fold.

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It's amazing to me that so many people seem to think Tom is wrong about this. In small stakes games this is absolutely true. At those limits, almost none of your opponents are paying attention to what you're doing. They all play their own cards.

This statement from one of the respondents is way off the mark:

zeero3
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SOOOOO WRONG!!!! What's the difference between losing a lot of money in high limits to that in low limits....

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Wow.

[Rudbaeck]

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I doubt you could lose money playing low liimts and raise AA at every street and never fold.

If you mean lose money with AA, I don't know for sure, but you're probably wrong.

If you mean lose money overall, I think you're very wrong.

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I'm fairly sure Tom was right. Sure, doing what he says would make the value of AA plummet from ~4BB to maybe 0.4BB, but I am almost sure the new figure will still be positive.

Hero is making less, but he is not losing money on his AA.

[Lansing]

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Wrong, wrong, wrong! Unless your postflop skills absolutely suck, the more callers the better. (In a ring game at least). It's not an opinion question. Unless there is another pair of aces out there, which there aren't, aces make money with EVERY bet players put into the pot before the flop. It's true that with 2 or 3 callers you win more pots, but you win less money that way too.
Sheesh.

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Let me see if I can explain this. *fingers crossed*

AA is by a country mile the easiest hand to make mistakes with postflop. That is why people want fewer callers, and it is totally understandable. If you get 2 callers instead of 8, for the post equity edge you give up not having 8 callers you get an ENORMOUS decrease in the ability of those aces to make you do stupid things.

Aces magnify postflop errors out of all proportion, and so all but the very best players in BM conditions (where you can read tells) should want more than about 4 callers with them. Any more than that and a less than world class player will make more than enough postflop errors to make up for any preflop pot equity advantage.

I have no data to back this up of course, but I am trying to explain what many of the posters here are getting at. Pot equity edges don't mean nearly as much when one factors in the enormous increase in postflop errors that aces induce from all but the best players (and even from them). If you only have 2 callers, you're only reading two hands, and you've got a much better chance of avoiding the errors that aces produce. You'll win smaller pots, but you'll win more of them and when you lose you'll lose FAR less money in the long run. I think the intuition here is that the decrease in the money lost more than makes up for the fact that you're winning smaller pots/sacrificing a pot equity edge. I think that's probably correct for the vast majority of players.