At the bottom of page 78 of Pot-Limit Omaha Poker, the 12th pre-flop practice situation concerns a re-raise or fold situation where you limp UTG with A-A-J-3 single-suited and face a raise and re-raise back to you. As in all of the pre-flop examples, you are playing a $2/$5 PLO game with $1000 stacks.

Now prior to the publication of the book, Bob Ciaffone was kind enough to read through the text, and disagreed with my recommendation in this particular example. After much consideration, I decided to keep my original recommendation, but I wanted to present both sides to the debate as I believe the arguments for both re-raising and folding to be compelling.

Question: You are dealt As-Ad-Js-3c UTG. You limp. the next player raises to $25 and three players call behind him. The small blind calls, but the big blind now reraises to $180. What do you do?

Answer: To be perfectly honest, my intent was to create a contrasting example where it would be correct to re-raise to try to get all-in or near it. The idea is that a re-raise would be to $665, which would be two-thirds of your stack, committing you to the pot and not giving the opposition the implied odds to try to pick you off. But when presented with this very problem, Bob Ciaffone had a very different answer: Fold.

Bob says, "My experience is that the reraise here shows the other two aces, so this is a very bad spot for your money. Even if you knock two or three opponents out of the pot, you are in poor shape, because you have little chance of winning the whole pot."

I definitely agree that the big blind has AA as well most of the time. My thought was that even if he did, then the money would be all-in and the $125 in dead money would create enough of an overlay to make a coin flip profitable. It is true that there are AA hands against which even the the dead money would make this play unprofitable (A-A-9-8 DS, for example, against which you are 45/55), but it is also probably true that the big blind's range probably extends beyond double-suited Aces with connectors.

There are a few other considerations.

1. The big blind may not have AA. I think this is probably more likely in deeper stack games than shorter stack games, but I've played in $5 blind PLO games with ultra-deep stacks where this re-raise is often made with hands such as J-T-9-8 or 6-5-4-3, or sometimes even something like KK double-suited. My feeling is that in this type of game where you are have $1,000 but the big blind and few of the other players have much more, it would be a mistake not to raise. However, within the context of this example (where everybody has $1000 or 200BB stacks), it would be more likely for the big blind to have AAxx.

2. If another player knew that two players both had AA, then somebody holding something like T-9-8-7 DS might be encouraged to jump in. With one live suit, T-9-8-7 DS has 40% equity against A-A-J-3 single-suited and A-A-9-4 double-suited. Interestingly, though, against As-Ad-Ts-9d and Th-9d-8d-7h, you have the equity edge at 34.2% (the A-3 combo makes another straight, and the T-9-8-7 hand has two cards in the other AA hand's suit).

3. I would also look at the hand from another player's perspective. I played in a $5/$5/$10 game in Tunica where an early player opened with a raise to $50, and the player behind him re-raised the pot to $190.  Both players had over $2,500, and I was the third-biggest stack with about $2,000. I figured the re-raiser for AA, and so I insta-called with T-9-8-7 single-suited hoping to catch a favorable flop. It got folded back around to the original raiser, who just called.

Now if instead the first raiser re-potted and the next player re-potted (which would set me all-in), I'm not so sure if I would want to stick my whole $2k in there, as I don't know whether my suit is live. Even doubled-suited I might not be in such good shape.

Now in the context of the original example, if another player thought both you and the big blind have AA, then he knows that calling your raise means calling all-in. How willing would he be to gamble here without implied odds?

Well, a lot of players will surprise you and call with a lot less than T-9-8-7 double-suited, at which point you are just gambling for your stack in pot in which you have $5 invested.

The idea behind the example was that if you can get all-in or near it (such as getting two-thirds of your stack and denying the opposition implied odds), then you should re-raise with AA. But I can definitely see the argument for folding.