Xaston, thanks for the write up.

Great analysis Xaston, and your reasoning is exactly why you should lead into the raiser with a big hand and stop check raising your big hands on the flop.

Excellent hand and analysis Xaston. This is great stuff.

A couple of things I might add:

--I think its key that Xaston had a read on AK as its played at this site at these limits. I think that really helps narrow the range and the play. If I'm at Prima 1/2 or Cake 1/2 I cannot say that AK is 4 banged all day.

--Something else one should consider before playing this as a turn bluff shove is how will that affect your game if you lose the hand. i think we regularly talk about the EV of this hand or that and sometimes underrepresent that playing very tricky hands like this for all the marbles can have a psychological toil. Are you going to tilt? Are you going to start calling on flops you really shouldn't.

I do firmly agree with Xaston that when the guy leads into the preflop reraiser on the QQ5 flop, he is weak. How you procede from there probably has more to do with your style and comfort level.

I prefer to just make a flop stand and take it down now or be done with it. Xaston prefers to milk his 88 for all its worth because he feels he can push him off his weakish hand range. I think the difference here is mostly style and variance aversion.

I disagree. The play is right or wong if we know what the villain has, but since we dont know what he has or even if he is dumb enough to call with 99, we dont know if the play is a good one or not.

Open raising AA on the button is a good play.

Xastons play is right in the middle of a giant grey area and we dont really know if its good or not.