I was playing in a big tournament last weekend and it was still fairly early in the tournament and I have average chip stack size and I was dealt poket AA's. My first tought was I need to raise quite a bit to narrow down the field. Also, I'm 2 players behind the button so I'm feeling pretty good about the situation. The guy across from me who was first to act goes all-in. HIs stack was slightly lower than mine. For me to call him was going to take about 75% of my chips. So when the action got to me I decided to go all-in so I could isolate which worked and we were heads up. He turns his cards over and he has pocket KK's and of course I have pocket AA's. I'm feeling pretty good. Well, as you can quess he hits a 2 outer on the river and beats me with trip K's. I still had chips left buy not many and I was out a little while after that. So my question is this, is there a good time to fold pocket AA's pre-flop early in the tournament to reduce my risk? I've heard some poker pro's say they've folded their pocket AA's and I'm wondering if this was one of those times I missed because it was too early in the tournament to take such a big risk. I'm asking this question because I've struggled a lot with high pocket pairs early in a tournament and just what to do with them. It's easy to raise with them. That's pretty standard. But to call a raise with them is much more difficult to know when to just call or when to raise or yes...when to fold them. Over my years of playing high pocket pairs early in the tournament has won me lots of chips but more importantly it cost me a lot too and in some cases such as this one it was a mistake I couldn't recover from. I need to improve this part of my game.