This is one of those recurring questions. "What should I with my aces? If I limp in, they get cracked. If I shove, everybody folds." Judging from those two results, both limping in and open shoving are both obviously poor strategies. Every time this question comes around I say the same thing. You don't limp with aces. In fact, I try to avoid ever limping in with any hand. Limping in allows players to see cheap flops with weak
hands in hopes of hitting bingo. I would say that nine times out of ten that I see aces getting cracked, the player who had them either limped in or flat called a min raise before the flop.
People say they want to limp in with their aces so that more players will get involved and make a bigger pot. Allowing more players into the hand doesn't make a bigger pot. One player calling a 3x pre-flop raise is putting as many chips in the pot a three limpers. But with each player that enters the pot the
odds of your aces holding up drops significantly. So what allowing more players in the pot really does is lessens your chance of actually winning the hand.
On the other hand, open shoving is likely to chase everyone out of the pot. If you're lucky, you might get a call just because there are so many idiots out there. Not to say that everyone the makes the call is an idiot. Some of them are. But some of them are good players that have seen a lot of idiots open shoving small pairs and weak aces. So you might get lucky and get a call. Maybe not. I know when I'm holding something like a medium pair or maybe A-J or something like that and someone open shoves in front of me, I will probably fold and tell myself "I hope he had ace and just wasted them". I'm not saying that getting your chips in pre-flop is a bad idea. In fact, I would love to get all my chips in before the flop with pocket aces. What I'm saying is open shoving is probably not the best way to go about it.
What I do is make my standard raise, 3xBB + 1x for each limper in front of me. If someone raises in front of me, then I 3-bet. If someone 3-bets me, I 4-bet and so on. This way I'm not necessarily giving away the strength of my hand and chasing everyone out, but I am going to minimize the number of bingo players in the pot and give my hand the best chance to hold up.
