Trip Aces vs an Aggressive Player, what do you do here?

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DECISION POINT:
In a live $1-2 game it folds to you in the Small Blind with A♣J♥ and you complete. The Big Blind (who you observed to be ultra aggressive) checks and you see a flop of A♠A♥5♦. You check and Villain goes all-in. Action is on you, what do you do here?

PRO ANSWER: In a $1-2 cash game with an ultra aggressive player on our immediate left we are dealt AJo in the Small Blind. It folds around to us. Under normal circumstances, this would be a hand we would want to raise and we should be raising some percentage of the time. However, against this type of very aggressive player and with these stack sizes we would like to have a range of hands that we can call then reraise with from the Small Blind. This would allow us to get more money in preflop with our superior hand range and limit our opponent’s positional advantage when playing deeper stacked preflop. This is one of those instances we decide to just limp and our opponent checks behind.

The flop is AsAh5d which is a monster flop for us. Our hand is massively unrepresented also since we did not raise preflop. Some mixture of betting out and checking in this spot is reasonable, particularly against an aggressive opponent who is unlikely to believe we have an ace here.

Continued below...

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We decide to check and our opponent moves all-in for our entire stack. Villain betting $151 into a $4 pot is a massive overbet and even from aggressive opponents this is often indicates a strong hand range.

This is potentially a scary spot to call for our whole stack but if we give our opponent a range of any ace, pocket 5s, and even a very small amount of bluffs (say they played KK this way) we are just over a 63% favorite. And if we take the kings out of their range we are still close to a 60% favorite.

We can never fold here unless our read on this player is very wrong.

Calling is the best play.

What would you do here?
Share your answer in the comments below!


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