Can you Ace my quiz?

[AJFenix]

Hand 1 I would fold.

Hand 2 I would call.

Hand 3, I would reraise. Your hand fares well against his range, but he has position on you and initiative. Even though some of you may say that you aren't going to play this hand just to hit an A or Q when you call, you are going to end up folding the best hand a high % of the time, and occasionally trapping yourself when you do hit and he has a better concealed hand with his garbage. You are out of position, where its much harder to get information and extract value.

By reraising you give yourself that initiative, and you are forcing him to make a hand with the bulk of his range if he wants to continue. You will get him to fold the best hand postflop some of the time, but more importantly you aren't going to be doing the same nearly as much. You are also exploiting a weakness of many of these players, as they are going to be calling you too often preflop trying to outflop your "big pair", and then folding postflop when they miss, which they will the majority of the time. There is also merit to calling with a hand like AQ (but being more prone to reraising things like A4 or rags) because people will really overplay weaker hands , but against the players at these stakes I think you will show a bigger profit by reraising if you repeated this scenario over a good sample. They will still overplay dominated hands, and you retain the rest of the value that reraising has.

Hand 4, Reraise > fold > call. Not even kidding here. I understand that people love pocket pairs, and good things happen with pocket pairs, but the fact of the matter is, its very unlikely your opponent is going to have a good hand when you smack the flop yourself, given how wide his range is. The implied odds really aren't there, and you are leaking money by calling here vs someone with a wide range as once again you are going to be folding the best hand a lot (regardless of whether or not you think you aren't necessarily playing for set value, plus the fact that you can still end up folding the best hand after putting more money in, vs. an aggressive draw for example), and you won't be making enough money when you do hit to make up for it. You are also out of position, as was pointed out, it is much harder to extract value when you do hit your big hand, and OOP without initiative makes it much harder to win those small pots.

Your hand, on the other hand, rates very well vs his range when he is only seeing 3 cards. When you reraise, once again you have initiative, can get him to fold a better hand postflop , end up folding the best hand yourself far less, etc. You force him into making decisions, which means you are giving him a chance to make a mistake, which of course means you make money. Plus some of the time you will still hit your set, which will be nicely concealed, and will win a big pot vs. an overplaying downie.