[catoandtonic]

Once you become more comfortable playing poker you should always have at least 100 bb's to start a hand. It is not a sin to have less than 100 bb's if you are "getting your feet wet." Once you have an edge on your opponents, then the larger the effective stacks, the larger your winrate. This is a side point and I will not dwell on it.

As you and others have said, the minraise pre-flop was not a very good move. From a pure equity standpoint, you want to get the most in pre-flop as possible. Villains at this level are surely going to call more than a minraise with wide variety of hands. In fact they will probably call a huge raise with those same hands. Your standard raise at this level with AA should be the MAX amount that you believe will be called. You can trust that your opponents will make major mistakes post-flop, because of the average low skill level at these stakes. This concept can be applied on other streets with other strong relative hands and imo is the easiest way to beat the lower stakes. eg.. straight or flush on the turn.

As a matter of fact, this is even true at much higher stakes where the players are much more savvy and odds aware. At the higher stakes, your opponents are going to value bet much harder their good hands, and to counteract this, you must do the same. One of your defenses is going to try to avoid paying them off, but it is impossible to win without getting paid yourself when it is your turn.

So, regarding this hand, we are focusing on getting paid with AA.

We should raise the MAX amount that we think is going to be called. DO NOT be afraid to test raise a very large raise, like to 13-16c. If that seems to get called frequently, then great, if not we can knock it down a cent or two. We can also observe our opponent(s) closely to determine if he is the type who calls 10c or a 24c raise. Whatever happens, we will never raise less than 4-5x the blind. If we did raise such a weak amount, then we would be offering our opponents too good of implied odds since we will rarely be folding post-flop. Our strategy is going to be pretty simple: RAM AND JAM!!! We will bet the most on any street that is reasonable.

Pre Flop: Bet the most that you believe will be called. Minimum of 4x the BB and preferably more.
Flop: Bet 85%-100% of pot regardless of flop or we make a pot sized raise.
Turn: Bet 75-100% of pot almost regardless of turn or we make a pot sized raise.
River: Little lee-way here, but I would generally recommend betting/calling 60%- all in, weighted heavily towards all in. This is going to be the trickiest street, but by this point we should be pot committed so f it, all in. You will sometimes be disappointed but a much larger portion of the time you will be rewarded.

The above can be modified slightly. There is a general pattern that you should be all in with AA by the time you get to showdown. In general with AA at this stake you should see showdown(with 100bb's) or close to it almost every time.

As a side point, a balanced strategy is required to beat higher stakes. At this level, balance is not required so much. If you employ a strategy value betting the [censored] out of your good hands at 5nl then you will beat it quicker than people will catch on to what you are doing. And I strongly suspect that you could spend your life at 5nl with little to no balancing and still crush it, consistently.


I would like to say that if you have a stack much over 100bb's then it becomes much more complicated and much of what I said is not as true. With 100bb's please get all in.

I spent a lot of time on this post, so I hope it helps someone.