I’m assuming the suit order on flop is mixed up since there (hopefully) can’t be two Ac. I think the flop is the crucial street in this hand but I’ll start by looking at the river decision, which is pretty close in my eyes.

Arguments in favor of calling:  

– We are getting 3.2 : 1 on our call and only need to win 23.7% of the time to break even. If there are antes in play our odds are even better.

– We block the nut flush.

– Villain may fold many backdoor flush combos to our flop bet. If we assume that villain has few suited gappers worse than T8s in their preflop range, there may be only 2 gutshot + clubs combos on the flop, and the turn eliminates Tc9c. I find it hard to give villain many club combos beyond flopped pairs and KQs,KJs,QJs,54s –  and that’s only if villain flats CO with 54s at 46bb effective (which seems borderline at best). 

– Our probable range for bet/bet/check at this stack depth is heavily weighted to strong one pair hands. Villain can profitably overbluff to an insane degree if we don’t call some Ax combos.  

– With the turn adding gutshots to villain’s 8x and 76 suited connectors, there may be some low pairs in villain’s range that get turned into bluffs.

Arguments in favor of folding:

– A lot of busted flush draws are not possible with the Ace on board and our Qd.

– Villain may not reach the river with some of the bluff combos we would like to include in their range (due to our bet sizing).

– Unless villain is flatting quite a few suited gappers, or floating flop very wide like QJ/J9s with no backdoor FD, there are very few missed straights. As opposed to the pairs mentioned above, T9s seems too strong for villain to turn into a bluff.

– Strong players won’t typically raise very often when in position vs. a polarized range, and your sizing strongly suggests a polarized range. Villain is highly incentivized to slow-play monster hands when our range is bluffs and very strong hands, and villain doesn’t need to raise flop or turn for value if your bet sizing makes it easy to get stacks in play on the river. 

– Villain can comfortably shove any two pair for value vs our bet/bet/check range. Are we ever checking A6s+ on the river with less than a 1/2 pot bet in our stack?

This is not intended to cover all lines of thinking, but hopefully shows that a good argument can be made for either play. I’m not going to break down all the combos in villain’s range, but that may be a useful exercise if you want to exhaustively examine this hand.

If we ignore any reads on villain, my feeling is that we can’t fold all combos of AQ here. The Ac is arguably the best blocker in the deck, but it’s pretty bad to be holding the Qd. We block 1/2 of the missed Broadway flush draw combos.

I think AK-AJ are essentially the same hand for bluff-catching this river. If you want to call some but not all of those, maybe call with all combos that have a as long as they don’t include a .

More importantly than anything above:

As you pointed out, your flop sizing seems much too large. You are betting 89.3% of the pot if there are no antes, and even if the pot is more like 3300 it is still 75%. Your reasons for sizing up because of the board texture strike me as misguided on 3 levels. 

1) This flop is not very dynamic, on a scale of 1 to 10 (with 10 = most dynamic) I would rate it roughly 4. There are no overcards possible, so top pair will not change. There’s a flush draw, but both players should have less flush draws when the A of that suit is on the board. The 8 and 6 create some straight draws, but they don’t remotely connect with the Ace (A85 strikes me as more dynamic). Although both ranges (ie. likely UTG+1 open and CO flat ranges) do flop some gutshots, there are far fewer straight draws than it might seem. Context is important, I would consider this board more dynamic if this hand were BTN open vs BB defend.

2) No matter how large you bet (unless overbetting), you’re not going to price out strong draws at this stack depth. I think villain’s call with GSSD and backdoor flush draw is pretty standard because of implied odds (and potential bluff opportunities). Andrew talks about this in one of his recent videos (I think it’s part of the Deception series). I’ll butcher it if I try to repeat his ideas, but you can’t really pick a size to price out draws without pricing out a bunch of the hands that we want to extract value from. If you are ‘happy taking it down’ with AQ on this board you may need to work on eliminating loss aversion from your mental game.

3) Your hand is very strong but you’re rarely in good shape against a range that wants to play for stacks. You never want to consider your bets in isolation, but rather approach them like a chess player (ie. thinking many moves ahead). You want your flop bets to set up favorable turn situations, and likewise with turn bets for river situations. For example, when considering all possible turn cards, would you prefer to play this hand out of position on the turn with 14,900 behind and 7800 in the middle (1.9 SPR) or with 16,200 behind and 5200 in the middle (3.1 SPR)?

My pleasure TW. I can’t count the number of times I’ve made a play that seems logical in game, but is very hard to justify when looked at more closely. Most of these mistakes revolve around using weird bet sizing. To be honest, it’s an extremely rare session that I don’t butcher at least 3 hands, although I often don’t find them until post-game review (and probably miss more than I find).

It’s a bit frustrating to constantly witness myself making mistakes that wouldn’t happen if my thought process was more consistent. That being said, poker is complicated enough that I’ve learned to be charitable with myself. So much of the challenge for me is learning to play at least half as well in game as I do in study. I know I’m making progress but, when it comes to focus and consistency, it often seems to be two steps forward and then at least one step back.

Apparently it takes me 200 words to say “I make the same kind of mistakes.”