Playing Pocket Aces

When you look down at your hole cards and see those pungent eyeballs looking back, your blood races, your heart pounds, and your hands begin to sweat. It's a natural reaction to pocket aces. After all, you've got the best possible hold'em hand. Everyone else is chasing you. In this instant, many players have an urge to drag (slowplay) aces. May I suggest that you fight this urge? Around here we have a saying:

SLOWPLAY ACES, GO TO HELL

Here's why, in three easy reasons.

1. When you slowplay aces, you let bad hands see cheap flops. Maybe the small blind completes with 7-8 suited and flops a 9-6-5 straight. You don't put him on a made hand, so you blithely bet out, only to face a raise. Now your bile rises -- how dare he raise your aces? -- so you reraise. Next thing you know, you're all in and drawing dead, just because you let some piece of cheap cheese into the pot.

2. Pocket aces don't like a lot of company. Yes, they're a preflop favorite against any other single hand. They're even a favorite against two or three other hands. As soon as they face four foes, though, your pocket aces become an underdog to the field. We raise with aces, then, not just to drive out crap hands but to preserve the edge our aces have.

3. Don't you want to earn some scratch? How will you do that if you don't get some money into the pot. Antonio Esfandiari's simple strategy for no limit hold'em is this: Build a pot, then take it away. That strategy works especially well when you hold a powerhouse like magic bullets. In the face of all this compelling logic, why do we drag our aces, ever? The answer is really not strategic, it's emotional. Aces come along so rarely that we don't want to waste them. We want to make big money from our big hands. We're afraid if we raise, everyone will fold, and we'll have nothing to show for our big aces but some piddling blinds. Know what? That's not the end of the world. At least you didn't let 8-7 suited in for cheap and take you off your whole stack.

Anyway, if everyone runs for cover when you raise with aces, you're probably not raising often enough with other hands. You do want to be raising, you know, with sufficient frequency so that your foes won't put you on a premium hand every time you push in some serious dosh. So here's a thought:

DON'T SLOWPLAY ACES -- FASTPLAY OTHER HANDS

That way, when you raise with aces, your foes will figure it's just another one of your frisky attempts to be a big hairy bully. They won't put you on aces and they will pay you off. Good times.

So the next time you look down at your hole cards and see those pungent eyeballs staring back at you, stifle all feelings of entitlement and concentrate on the task at hand: protecting your big pocket pair and making sure you get some profit from the hand.