Why Do I Suck With AA?

So it is a long-burning question in my mind why I suck so badly with AA so I thought I'd throw some math at it. Big surprise, I know.

My winrate with AA is simply pathetic - I believe it is 1.6 BB / hand when most of the results I've seen from other players are slightly north of 3 BB / hand. Let's assume, then, that my deficiency is about 1.5 BB every time I've been dealt it. How significant is this? Well, I've been dealt AA 400 times, so I'm down 600 BB from where I "should" be if I earned what others earn. This is a non-trivial percentage of my entire earn for two years. Even if I "just" look at my Cake hands (softer site, and I should be better at poker than when I started 2 years ago), my AA suckage means a deficit of 200 BB which is 20% of my 1000 BB total - this alone would boost my winrate by 0.7 BB/100. Yikes!

There are many options for the source of this leak:

• Not letting AA go when beaten.
• Losing more than necessary with AA when beaten.
• Not getting value from AA when ahead.

The second option is kind-of a subset of the first one, but the first option speaks to not folding AA enough, and the second one is about showing it down for more bets than I should have shown it down for. Make sense?

Well, the first option is the one I want to tackle in this post - how often do I lay down AA, and how often "should" I lay it down? It turns out I have only laid down AA 5 times out of the 400 times I've been dealt it (once on the flop, three times on the turn, once on the river). I'm not even convinced that the river fold was correct (I folded top set on the river to a single bet heads-up on a 4-flush board). So I fold 5 of 400 or 1.25% of the time. Is this good? Bad? What is the "reference"?

Well I checked in with my poker "coach" and had him look at his 150K+ hand database. Out of his 711 AA hands he folded 32 times (once on the flop, 15 times on the turn, 16 times on the river) for a 4.5% "fold rate". So, based on this one data point I am simply not laying them down enough.

But wait - we can determine how big an "error" this is in my case. If I "need" to fold an extra 3.25% of the time, that means I showed down 13 AA hands that I "shouldn't" have. However, figure for each of these hands I lost an extra 1-2 BB / hand (either a river bet I shouldn't have called, or a turn and river bet I shouldn't have called. So at most I lost 26 BB more than I should over those hands. But my overall "deficit" with AA is 600 BB !!!!

The conclusion I can draw from this is that although I am very obviously showing down AA more than I should, it is not even close to the biggest leak I must have with AA - it explains less than 5% of my deficit. This calculation at least jibes with some platitude that I remember (from a 2+2 or Ed Miller article or something) that said that if you showed down every AA hand you got at limit poker, it would be at most a small error.

So, it looks like it is off to the database to look for hands where I've either not gotten value (most likely, knowing my own tendencies), or paid too much to show down. It is only 400 hands - how hard could it be to go through them all?

I'll leave this post with the one AA hand I folded on the flop - within a month or two of me starting to play the game online:

** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to Hero [ Ad Ac ]
BigFreeze101 folds.
ukvixen calls [$0.15].
Hope06 calls [$0.15].
bwhit86 calls [$0.15].
Mcblunt111 folds.
rainbowpants folds.
KGssd1 calls [$0.15].
Hero raises [$0.30].
Pandaro39 folds.
Rennwurm folds.
ukvixen calls [$0.15].
Hope06 calls [$0.15].
bwhit86 calls [$0.15].
KGssd1 calls [$0.15].
** Dealing Flop ** [ Jd, Jh, 6s ]
ukvixen bets [$0.15].
Hope06 raises [$0.30].
bwhit86 calls [$0.30].
KGssd1 calls all-In.
Hero calls [$0.30].
ukvixen raises [$0.30].
Hope06 raises [$0.30].
bwhit86 calls [$0.30].
Hero folds.
ukvixen calls [$0.15].
** Dealing Turn ** [ 7c ]
ukvixen bets [$0.30].
Hope06 calls [$0.30].
bwhit86 folds.
** Dealing River ** [ Tc ]
ukvixen bets [$0.30].
Hope06 calls [$0.30].
ukvixen shows [ 2d, Jc ] three of a kind, jacks.
Hope06 shows [ Js, Ks ] three of a kind, jacks.
KGssd1 doesn't show [ Qc, Qh ] two pairs, queens and jacks.
Hope06 wins $2.91 from side pot #1 with three of a kind, jacks with king kicker.
Hope06 wins $1.92 from the main pot with three of a kind, jacks with king kicker.