Fast action tourney question

[flapjack]

Here is the tournament I played in Sunday. $135 buy in NL Hold’em, 3 $50 rebuys, 100 people. First place is Trip for 2 to Vegas, 5 nights of hotel, buy to WSOP main event. Fifty people played Saturday and fifty Sunday. Top ten from each day go back Tuesday to finish up. I had a hand that came up that I wanted to get others opinions on.

I have AQ [img]/images/graemlins/spade.gif[/img], table is 8 handed. Blinds are 700-1400. I make it 4k to go. All fold to BB, who has me covered by a little. BB thinks for a long time and then pushes all in. If I fold I will be left with about 4k. Blinds are going up, to 1k-2k, in a couple of minutes. I am not interested in finishing 8th (Last Payout). I figure I am behind at this point but probably not to bad. I don’t believe he has Aces, Kings, or Queens. I felt I had a pretty good read on him. I didn’t think the long stall was trying to sucker me in. AK was the only thing I was a little worried about. 1. Should I have committed ~50% of my stack with AQ utg? 2.Since the blinds go up so fast (20 min) and there is so much all inning preflop, should I muck AQ? I am not going to limp but I’m not sure if I can fold here. I can look back and say “If I’m going to call the reraise then I should just push it all in the first place.”. However I’m not sure I will commit my chips until I see who reraised.

Long and short of it: River comes a Q and I double up. A little later, 6 handed, my AQ [img]/images/graemlins/club.gif[/img] loses to QT off suit. This time Blinds are 1k-2k and I raise on the button to 6k.. Luckily the board was very scary so QT couldn’t push his two pair. I make it to the final ten with 17k in chips. Blinds will start at 1k-2k. Chip leader for both days has 54k. I am about 8th out of 20 over all. There are several people who only have 3 or 4k left. Small stack has 900: he better draw a nice seat. All comments on the hand or general strategy are appreciated. Thanks.

[deacsoft]

I don't think it's such a bad play. It's hard to play those hands from UTG. You don't want to ever go all-in from UTG with that hand unless your are short stacked. I think putting in 50% of your chips was too much. Maybe a bump of 2-2.5 times the BB would be good. You made the right call by calling the all-in. If you already had half of your chips in there you might as well call. Plus you had a good hand. If you fold there you'll be forced to make some bad moves later on unless you get some great hole cards. Makes sense to me. I just wouldn't raise that much preflop from UTG w/ A-Qs because I don't want to have to call someone putting me all-in. Hope this helps, and good luck to you.