POT

Raise, hope to get to 4bet pot.

Raise pot. You're almost never folding here. Look to 4bet if you get 3bet

Ok so... since AA72r is the wort AA hand ever, u people never fold any AA hand preflop in any situation? Is that correct? xO

So far, these are all weak arguments for opening the hand 100%. There are probably lineups+ stacksizes at fullring where limping is far superior to opening for pot, and very rare ones where it is, in fact, best to fold. Also, AAAx is probably worse than AA72r so why don't you ask that question as a starting point? It is very weak postflop unless you hit a nfd blocker board/case A/disconnected paired board. However, it is certainly the preflop nuts whereas AA72 vs other AAxx is quite bad, and at FR that's a much bigger concern than at 6max.

Edit: I read this back and my tone comes off as quite hostile. Not at all my intention, sorry!

1) "So far, these are all weak arguments for opening the hand 100%. There are probably lineups+ stacksizes at fullring where limping is far superior to opening for pot"

Very few and I don't think its ever far superior. The only time I can really think of it is that openlimping leads to huge multiway pots whereas open potting it makes everyone fold, which I can't think to be the case very often unless the games you're playing are weirdly soft. In this spot its been folded to us in MP, 5 people left to act, plays very similarly to 6max. Limping this will more often than not lead to us being raised, and then us playing a 3bet pot OOP with awkward SPR and a very polarised hand. Opening for full pot leads to us playing multiway a lot with a polarised hand, or will lead to us being raised and we can start getting money in. AAAx plays similarly.

2) "very rare ones where it is, in fact, best to fold".

In a cash game, you're never folding AAxx pre if you're first in the pot. There can't be a reason. You're only ever folding this pre due to very specific reads when there's been action ahead of you.

3) "However, it is certainly the preflop nuts whereas AA72 vs other AAxx is quite bad".

You have two of the aces, so there's only two left. The odds of someone else on the table having the other two is absolutely tiny combinatorics wise, even at FR. It's like saying you shouldn't be being aggressive with KK in NL incase someone has AA. It happens sometimes, but not often enough to be seriously worried about it (unless like I said before we have specific reads on a specific situation).

4) "It is very weak postflop unless you hit a nfd blocker board/case A/disconnected paired board."

This is true. AAAx has quite a unique dynamic in the sense that it combines the idea of being a very polarised hand like this, but if we can get 33% of our stack in preflop, we can shove nearly any flop unexploitably +EV. In limped pots, we can achieve big multiway pots and hit top set. Most of the time, we can raise pre and achieve the same thing and also allow ourselves to be able to play some actual poker in the hand. Its also really hard to extract value most of the time when we do hit our top set, unless we're in the loosest game in the world, in which case why not just raise pre, build a pot and try and extract max value when we do hit? We only get 3 streets in a passive game, make them big.

The main reason I dislike limping this hand so much is the dynamic it creates. You usually get raised by someone IP from you (very rare this isn't going to happen in a semi-competent game, unless we're playing weird straddle dynamics which does change things but in this post we aren't). At this point we can either a) flat, not be preflop aggressor, miss and check and get cbet and no idea where we are or b) 3bet, get called by someone IP, miss the flop and be left with a really awkward SPR. If we do hit, getting value is going to be hard in both cases. I don't think I'd ever ever limp this hand pre. Flat call a raise is different, that I'm doing a lot. The same with overlimping, I'm almost always overlimping weak AAxx if the opportunity presents itself. That's another discussion though :)

Not hostile at all. I've always tried to go against the grain with the way I think about poker but there's only so much that can be debated in NL these days so here I am in the PLO forum. Anyway, here is a possible scenario where I would consider folding very bad AA in first couple spots of a 9 handed game:
High stakes game running around one huge whale: a typical PLO whale who plays too many hands preflop, doesn't mind coldcalling 3bets with junk, and plays very straightforward postflop. Almost every other player is smart and aggressive and the big blind is world class. Also, you're playing 300bb effective with almost everyone.
Why: The supposed dream scenario/most important reason for pot-opening all AA is that if you get pot-3b you can pretty much unexploitably pot-4b and pot flop without looking. That is probably not a very good strategy in the game described: you would have a flop SPR of 3.43 (this seems like not a great spot) when you get flatted, and when you get pot-5b I suspect you will have around 43% equity still needing to put in 43.6% of the final pot if all-in(Yes, this is real and you might be able to fold vs some players-although I think the strategy of flatting and only folding when the flop is monotone and you don't block the suit, and donkbetting 1/6 pot or praying your opponent checks back to decide on a flop like KQQr, is probably a better response that recoups enough EV). Another scenario is when the fish gets involved and you still face the pot-3b from CO. You are losing quite a lot of money the times you repot into better AA and the fish has an unpaired hand that doesn't fold.

I disagree with all of this. In case you don't play much NL these days, if you open KK utg 6m for 3bb and a regular in the BB 3bets you to 12bb, 100bb eff, you should probably just call. The justification is much more complicated than being "seriously worried" about AA, but it is indicative of the caution you should take to not shovel money in vs tight polar ranges, and to not leave holes in optimal defense ranges. Maybe someone more math intensive can give you a better idea exactly how worried you should be in PLO, but it sounds like you vastly underestimate how often it happens.

I think limping is OK because you probably want to do some open-limping at FR PLO. Limping weak AA hands will allow you to represent an uncapped range on more board textures, and to more frequently isolate short stacks who get aggressive preflop behind you. If you are uncomfortable to limp-call AAxx preflop and play postflop from there, chances are there are huge flaws in your fundamental understanding of poker strategy. You have a range and your opponents also have ranges; now it's time to analyze how the community cards affect those ranges and go from there. I think it is poisonous in PLO to think of hands as "the nuts" pre-river and think that means you should always try to pile a bunch of money in because you have the current highest absolute value. This is frequently a very bad strategy!

If the pot goes multiway with crazy frequency and at the same time u wont get 3bet often, i see no point in raising weak AA since you will never ever realize full equity u have preflop against so many players.If flop goes check in multiway, i dont see many opportunities to delay cbet.That leaves only intention to play for hitting a set so again i dont see point in raising . Therefore limping becomes the best.

Seacombe:

1) I don't really see how raising to pot increases our EV vs limping based on the "implied odds", as you call it, of flopping top set. If we are about to flop top set on a non-straight/mono board, we should want to allow as many opponents to see the flop as possible, not push some of them away with a maximum open. Our EV when flopping top set is dependent on SPR and the specific opponents and positions they are in when we reach a flop- this is something we don't have much control over with our open-size; there are so many possible outcomes of preflop action such that it's not very important how much money we put in the pot with the first action, at least before we specify our opponents, their positions, and their stack sizes. When you raise to pot, the flop goes multiway, and you don't hit anything relevant, you often can't cbet or check-call profitably and have lost the maximum. There isn't anything special about this hand that makes the $ gained from top set situations obviously greater than money lost c/fing flop/making meh cbets multiway when you open bigger vs smaller/limp

2) Your assumptions about 3betting frequency seem wild (who is 3bing FR-UTG that much?) but are kind of irrelevant in my example of playing deep since AA frequency is a constant. In your example if we open UTG 9m there are 6 players who may 3b us in position, not just the person you pointed out. I don't think the result of losing like 15% of our 300bb stack on 2% of our opens vs AA (-90bb/100) is insignificant.

3) You reiterate that you don't know how to play weak AAxx once you've limped. OK, there were 4 other limpers and a PSR. Just call. Your hand is a disguised top set draw- a pretty good hand to have here, a fair bit better than KKxx but still way too weak to re-raise. Obviously don't fold. What's the problem?

forhayley i was going to read the essays u guys wrote but i only got to the first line about being hostile in seacombe's reply and lost interest. A year or so ago this was such as clear open for me and I was so clueless now that I think about the spot retrospectively. However; I was lucky, I intuitively started limping with the intention of back raising without even knowing why :)

jmarcer enough time has gone on

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTDeEJyCmNA