Do you ever fold AAxx preflop? Should you ever fold AAxx preflop? There are surely great differences in the strength of different AAxx hands, for example between AAT9ds and AA83 rainbow. But let's assume you have a poor AAxx without nut flush draws or straight draws in the late position and there is a large raise and a re-raise. You have discussed on this forum about getting most of you stack in PF with AAxx. So, if you can go all in preflop, would you do it every time even without flush or straight draws? If you can't get your stack in, would you even call?

I don't like poor AAxx hands too much so I might even consider folding, because you rarely hit your set of aces anyway. In the example I gave your edge is not necessarily great. When there is lots of raising and re-raising preflop there could easily be another AAxx out or at least a hand with one ace. If you have noting but a pair of aces, is it still worth of your whole stack PF? I guess there are much better situations go all in.

I have never and will probably never fold AAxx preflop in PLO high (I have and do fold it in PLO8).

Theoretically there is exactly one situation where you should fold it as fasr as I know, and that is if it's a 3-way pot and you're sure at least one other player has AA and the third has a medium or low wrap hand. In that scenario your AA is actually -EV.

However, not only are these situations very rare, it's also very hard to know for sure that you're in one of them and avoid making a huge mistake like folding and finding out you were up against KKxx and AKQJ making you a big favorite.

Even a really bad AAxx hand is not far behind a very good one, so with the dead money that is usually in the pot together with the money you put in to find out what you're up against, you usually have a positive expectation to continue in the hand.

Example of when to (possibly) fold:

You're in MP and raise pot with AA83 rainbow for some reason. An aggressive and competent player behind you calls, and a true rock behind him re-raises. Now you KNOW the rock won't re-raise with anything less than AA, and you have the worst possible AA so obviously he is a favorite over you. Also, the competent player behind you most likely has a hand that will be an equity favorite 3-ways against two AA hands,so although you have the current "nuts", you're actually worst off of all three.

Stack depth also comes into effect here. If you're deep, you're fucked. You can't get it all-in now and you're unlikely to get any help from the flop, so you will be playing a raised pot out of position against at least one competent and aggressive player who has an undefined hand. You will basically be forced to check/fold the vast majority of flops and as such might as well just dump the hand now and save yourself the money and the headache.

If stacks are short enough that you can get it all-in now or on the flop, any mistake you make will be relatively small so you can continue, but if calling the re-raise leaves you with more than 70% of your stack intact, I'd suggest dumping.


Of course this is such a rare occurance where you will fold AA that how you play the istuation is unlikely to effect your winrate.

Normally in online play stack sizes are not deep enough. So I will not waste time to make some thoughts of folding AAxx preflop. Just move all-in is in the long run +EV, even against a raise and a reraise.

Here a hand with a raise and a reraise. You see a raise and a reraise means not always the reraiser has aces:

Poker Stars
Pot Limit Omaha Ring game
Blinds: $0.10/$0.25
5 players


Stack sizes:
UTG: $55.75
CO: $39.40
Hero: $24.10
SB: $39.15
BB: $19.35

Pre-flop: (5 players) Hero is Button with
UTG folds, CO raises to $0.75, Hero calls, SB raises to $3.25, BB folds, CO calls, Hero raises to $13.25, 2 folds.
Uncalled bets: $10 returned to Hero.

Results:
Final pot: $10

Stoneburg is right. You dont want to see a flop when you're deep with a weak AAxx

I often just fold a weak (i.e. totally unsuited) AA out of position to a raise. Let's say I'm SB, someone good pots in LP, and it folds to me. I just don't see how calling here can be better than folding, unless the stacks are a bit deeper than the usual, and/or you have a VERY good read and psychological hold on the good player.

I wouldn't lose too much sleep over dogging a few crap AAxx's, especially if you're not a great post-flop player or if you're a beginner. A really top PLO player will make money with AA in more or less every situation in raised pots, but if you're not dramatically better than most of your opponents, there's really no need to play ugly AA hands out of position against decent-sized raises.