[Lloyd]

Welcome to our second "Hand With the Masters". This was originally submitted by none other than Gigabet. Much thanks to him for taking the time to not only submit the hand but provide a lot of his thought process, more of which will hopefully come at the end when we bring our Masters together.

Here's how this is going to work (same as last time):

1. I've sent the hand to our expert panel (which included MLG and Che) decision point by decision point. So they only had access to the information that they would have had if they were playing the hand themselves. Obviously, this was an actual hand and when a panelist's line deviated from how the hand was played they still played the hand out as it actually went down. So if they said they would fold and in the actual hand it was raised, they played the next decision point as if they had raised.

2. I'm going to post the hand in multiple threads step by step over the next couple of days. This will make it as real as possible. I plan on adding a decision point approximately every 24 hours. Please be patient and understand that we're trying to 1) allow everyone a chance to view the decision point post prior to being influenced by a subsquent post; and 2) allow enough time for lots of discussion.

3. Once everyone has had a chance to comment on all aspects of the hand, I'll post how our experts played it out along with the thought process they have presented. We'll then give them an opportunity to post and discuss why they liked one approach versus another.

4. We'll bring the forum back to continue the discussion. Essentially, this will be the hand we'll talk about over the next week.

So without further adieu:

Setup
$100+9 Party Poker MTT
Blinds 50/100
Hero is Gigabet
No strong reads on other players

Stacks
UTG: t5380
Hero: t2670
MP: t1270
MP+1: t1333
MP+2: 2395
CO: t1394
Button: t2917
SB: 2270
BB: 2915

Pre-Flop
Hero is dealt A[img]/images/graemlins/heart.gif[/img] K[img]/images/graemlins/diamond.gif[/img]

UTG folds. Action is on the hero.

Do you call or raise? If you raise, to what? Since most players usually raise with AK in this spot, under what scenarios would you just limp and why? If you raise and get re-raised, what's your plan (which obviously could depend on which player re-raises you)?