Would you call here?

[tallstack]

Thanks to everyone who replied here.

I certainly don't like the situation I got myself into here. With about 14xbb, I opted for a standard raise. I didn't consider limping or folding beacuse I was in mid position with four left to act behind me and there was too much chance that my hand was the best to fold or limp here. I also didn't like limping because I have a better idea of where I stand post flop if I force out the trash. Obviously, getting reraised shows the down side of raising with AQ here. With a larger stack I would fold easily here, and with a smaller stack I would have gone all-in off the start. With this stack size, maybe there will always be some hard decisions when you are put all-in.

What does bug me about my pre-flop raise is - would I ever get rid of the hand, and if not, then why not go all-in from the start? My first instinct when I was reraised was to fold. I waited for a few seconds and then gradually talked myself into calling. I certainly would have folded this to a reraise and a cold call (or third raise). I just couldn't release it to a single reraise when I was getting about 1.6:1 on the call. I thought that I was taking the worst of it here, but that I may get shown, JJ, TT, 99 or even AQ enough to make the call. His earlier slowplay also made me think that he would possibly have called with AA or KK since he knew it would be heads-up at that point. I was most worried of seeing QQ or AK here.

In the end he showed me AJ (to my surprise) and I won unimproved. This is not to say that I think I made the right decision here.

Dave S