AQs-UTG By a Newbie - Can I Have Played This Differently

I am new to tournaments, have not read any tourney books and have only used infos and guidelines learned from CP magazine and casual lurking on this forum. Inspite of basically playing via the seat of my pants, I've been lucky enough to win 2, and 2 final tables at small 20-2 tourneys at Pokerroom out of 12 I've entered so far. Anyway got involved in this hand last night:

Blinds of 100/200 with about 46 players left out of 116. With T4720, raised 650, UTG with AdQd. Player to my immediate left who got me covered, called without any hesitation. Everyone folded. Heads up to a flop of Q T X rainbow. I bet 1500 and got called with no hesitation again. Turn was a rag and I pushed. Without any hesitation he called again. It is only then that I thought I was trapped. River was another brick. He turned over KK amd I was out.

Detailed response please for my education. Thanks.

[nolanfan34]

I'll be interested to see what others say about this as well.

Personally, when a big stack just keeps calling me down on a board like that, to reasonably big bets, a red light goes off that I'm probably beat. I've just seen many times that when you've been the aggressor PF and on the flop, they'll let you keep being the aggressor if they think they have you beat. In this case that's exactly what happened. I'm sure he would have raised you if you only bet on the turn and didn't go all-in.

I suppose the only thing I would potentially do differently is maybe push in on the flop instead, if I thought my opponent is loose enough to call a PF raise with KQ, QJ, or a PP between 99-66. In this case you would have still lost if he called, but there's a chance he might think you flopped a set or have AA and might have mucked his hand. Doubtful but possible.

Nice work on your early MTT results though, small sample size aside, two wins is nothing to sneeze at.

[eMarkM]

There are those who would say muck AQ in EP, but I'm not one of them. Gap Concept and all says raising here will take down the blinds frequently. And yeah, you'll get caught like you did. A slow played AA/KK is often deadly especially when you flop TPTK because the vast majority here will reraise you here and then your AQ doesn't look so good and then you can consider mucking it. Very difficult to put the guy on AA/KK here. Others will say "oh it's so obvious you're beat" after you've given all the hand details, but that's simply not the case in your typical $20 tourney. Often you'll get guys calling you down with KQ, a draw, or even 2nd pair. He played you well, I find it difficult to get away from these hands in small buyin tourneys against unknown opponents.