What is the calling card (pun intended) of the weak no-limit hold'em player? My answer would be letting the opponent draw cheaply - or for free - and then paying off big-time when the opponent gets lucky. Many people would agree with this, including a lot of poker writers. Generally, slow-playing pocket aces gets chastised in print, to the extent that slow-players of this hand often are derided in poker literature. I admit that I myself do not do a lot of slow-playing, but there is a big difference between infrequent and never. My opinion is, there are some spots in which slow-playing aces is at least a viable alternative to consider, and there are a few situations in which it may well be the superior play.

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My moniker at a couple of online sites is “IonlyPlayAA.” Way back in 2004 when I went deep in the main event of the World Series, one of my opponents commented, “He only plays aces.” The comment made the TV broadcast, and hence, one of my online monikers was born. It’s always fun to be dealt aces with that kind of online name.

You will often hear people say that you shouldn’t go broke with pocket aces when the stacks are deep. Every scenario is different, and I’m going to discuss a hand that I played recently in which my play looks very passive. It is important to understand that both aggressiveness and passiveness have a place in poker. Good players adjust their play based on what the situation demands.

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As long as I've been writing about poker, I have heard two questions asked again and again. First, is pocket aces really the best hand, or are some other hands better? And second, should you limp into the pot with them sometimes, or should you always raise? I'd like to put these questions to rest in this column.

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In Texas Holdem, Pocket Aces is of course the best hand you can get. Call them what you want, but they only get dealt once every 220 hands (according to statistics). In reality you might see them more often, or less often for that matter, if you're having a bad run for example.

The less experienced player will often make a fundamental mistake, although you also see this happen with many of the best players in the world. When getting dealt pocket Aces in a No Limit cash game, you might want to, instinctively, push in your entire stack immediately. The question I'm asking here is...why?

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While playing recently in ESPN's World Championship of Poker, the following hand came up. With the blinds at $2,000-$4,000 and an ante of $500 a man, Michael picked up A-A in first position and folded it. I stand by Michael's play and claim that it was the right move, 100 percent!

Why do I support the laydown? How can it be correct to fold pocket aces before the flop? Well, here are the facts: Michael was at the table before the final card was dealt, he had the chip lead at the table, there were 55 players left, and 45 of them were going to get paid. So, what the heck was going on here?

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Suited aces come in three flavors. The best suited aces are those in which the other card is a big card - king, queen, jack, or 10. These hands, especially suited A-K and A-Q, are premium hands. Their value comes primarily from the high cards and secondarily from the flush and straight possibilities. In deep-stack poker, however, these secondary possibilities may prove to be big earners when you encounter a similar hand without flush possibilities.

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I recently did a “pro chat” on Full Tilt Poker, asking players what questions or problems they had in the areas of probability, statistics, and mathematics in relation to poker. I was somewhat surprised that a lot of players still have questions about calculating and using pot odds, outs, and related concepts. It seemed to me that so much has already been written about these ideas that there is no excuse for not being up to speed on them. One other subject created a lot of interest, and as you can see from the subtitle of this column, that topic is folding aces before the flop. Everyone wanted to know if I had ever folded aces before the flop, and if it could ever be right to do so. Answer both of the following questions before you proceed to read the rest of this column.

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Poker can be a very emotionally taxing game, and people tend to do some crazy stuff when things aren’t going their way; sometimes you feel like the whole world is against you. Take, for example, this story that happened at The Bike a while back.

The game was $6/$12 Hold’em and it was your typical LA Limit Hold’em game. Pots were so big they needed two dealers to push them. One participant was an Asian gentleman who was having just a horrific run of bad luck. He managed to lose several big pots in a row and now, finally, he found himself in the biggest pot of the day. When I say this was a big pot, ladies and gentlemen, I mean it could have qualified as a small European nation. Our friend, who was sitting there with pocket aces in his hand, had flopped trips and was beginning to feel his fortune had turned, when he got rivered by a gut shot straight, and the aces went down in flames. As the dealer was shoving the beast of a pot, someone said:

“What’s that smell?”

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