Min-raising pre-flop with Aces

So here's the scenario. You pick up Aces pre-flop. There is a raise ahead of you to triple the BB. You want to felt someone...or better yet...multiple someones! You have the absolute best starting hand in Texas Hold'em in fact your hand is essentially bulletproof, I mean really, they're POCKET FREAKIN' ACES!. But how do you cash in on this monster of all monster hands? First thing to do is get more money in pre-flop. How? The clear, obvious, and correct answer is none other than the min-raise. So in this example. SB is 1, BB is 2, there is a standard open raise of 6 and it's to you so you cleverly MIN-RAISE the bet. This accomplishes the following objectives:

• It starts the inevitable flow of chips from other people's stacks to your stack.


• It cleverly disguises the strength of your hand because if you had a really strong hand, you'd raise it up big right? So if you raise the absolute minimum then you are communicating to the table that you have a very very weak hand. Almost not even worth raising in the first place.


• By keeping the raise small, you are making it affordable for others to come into the pot. It will only be another six chips to the original raiser, so they will HAVE to call, and anyone else left to act knows that the original raiser will call the extra six so they are more likely to come into the pot as well since they will be getting better pot odds, right? The LAST thing you want to do is scare off potential customers.


• It will increase your chances of winning a huge multi-way pot because if you raised too much, you will likely only get one caller instead of, say, three callers. Plus, the people who are likely to call are the ones you probably have dominated, i.e. lower pairs or big Aces like AK/AQ.

It's almost not fair to take player's chips like this. If you are lucky they will flop a strong hand (but not stronger than your Aces of course) and they will get the money in the pot...errr, rather your stack(!) as fast as you can say "flop, turn, river". And if no one bets ahead of you, it's probably best to check behind to let them catch up because it would be a shame to waste this once every 221 hands opportunity. If you bet at the pot when all the other players have is an open ended straight draw or a (obviously lower) pocket pair waiting to set up then you aren't going to get any chips and all the work from your cleverly crafted min-raise will have all gone for naught.

So there you go, that is the sure fire way to take down a monster with everyone's favorite hand, pocket Aces. I had some reservations about blogging this master strategy because I don't want to give away TOO many secrets but I make an exception in this case because I want to encourage others to adopt this winning formula whenever they pick up AA. Ohhh, and keep in mind this it works for pocket Kings too!