playing pocket aces

[ffcowboy76]

People forget that pocket A's are just a single pair. Lets say you come in for 3x the bb from early position and get 3 callers. There are 13.5 bets in the pot as the flop hits. Flop comes KQ5 rainbow and you have first action. You bet 10 bb's and the button caller raises you to 40 bb's. What do you do? Do you call, fold, push over the top? This is where people screw up with A's. If you push and get called 90% of the time you are chasing 2 outs. The other 10% of the time you are up against a weaker hand that has a chance of beating you. There are times to fold A's post flop and time to push hard.

I'm not a fan of pushing all in preflop, unless you have it limited to 1 other player. You take away your option on the flop to out play your opponent if they flop some sort of a drawing hand. If you bet to take away the odds and they call, make a note on them for chasing without odds. Chance are they have a history of doing this and you wil see them again.

[0maxpower0]

Playing aces definately varies depending on the game, meaning whether its limit or no limit. Obviously the rule of thumb in limit is raise with aces all day, and just slow down on bad boards when they come.
In no limit particularly at a larger table I will never slowplay my aces, it seems to always lead to trouble. With so many different hands out there that will undoubtedly call you, you want to limit the number of palyers that join with a raise. The worse thing you can do, in my opinion, is fire a bunch of chips into a blind pot with your aces, getting no action. Whether it be 6 handed or 9 or 10 handed, i wouldnt ever advocate limping.
However the one occaision i can even see slow playing the aces is in the high limits of a shorthanded tourney or the high limits of a regular tourney. The blinds are so big anyway, and the reliative chips stacks of the players aren't that many multiples of the big blind, the pots that are going to be played are huge anyways, so yo might as well get what money you could while you can.
Golden rule: raise with aces, i like to raise the same amount with aces as i would normally entering a pot with ak aq tt or the like. this way if i run into an ak kk qq, theyre so used to my raises that i could jsut as easily have one of the moderate hands as opposed to aa. And, even though it sucks getting aa cracked, i always want to get some value out of them. And if i go gung ho better i get no action, and if i limp i get too much.