| Laying Down AK
This is a follow up to my last post in the Poker Strategy Threads "AJ 5 Handed," only this situation happened earlier in the same tournament...
With still 2 tables of eight players left in the tourney, the blinds are 500-1000. After winning a nice pot of about 20,000 a few hands earlier, I decided to take a food break as my stack was now up to around 37,000 (still less than my original starting stack of 40,000, but you'll understand why over the next few posts). As I hurried back from my kitchen, I sat down to AK suited in the cutoff. With 1 player having already limped into the pot from early position, I make a raise to 4,000. The button, small blind and big blind all fold over to the limper (who has about 80,000 and is a pretty solid player) who immediately re-raises to 13,000. I nearly choke on my sandwich, then quickly decide to muck my AK, turning it over and showing it to him. That raise to me just wreaked 10s or better. Being a nice guy, he turned over JJ saying good fold.
Semi-joking after the hand was over, he said, "I swear, you always do that! If one or two people limp into a pot in front of you, you always raise it!" Now, I don't ALWAYS do that, but I do it every once in a while if I think I can steal. Obviously that wasn't the case when I had the AK.
The question in all of this is should I have folded here? One option is to call the raise, but then again I would be calling off 1/3 of my stack. The other is to re-raise all in, but I would've hated to put my tournament life up in the air on a possible coin flip so early...but what do you guys think?  | 
