[JFJB]

As I read you and got to the results, I was fully expecting vilain to show AQ here. Vilain got quite lucky on the river and it sucks (bad).

The trade off in how you played the hand versus the standard raise pre-flop, bet big on the flop and shove the turn is variance. You have to be fully aware of it and what it means.

In a tournament there a key points where you want variance and other times where you do not want to much variance and you have to play accordingly and accept that you will get the good and bad sides of variance. It is all situationnal.

Key informations missing in your post is the stack of vilain and where the tournament is at. By the size of the stacks it looks like just before or after the bubble, a criticical time. If vilain as something like 9 or 10 k then I think that betgo approach is clearly a very good one to consider. You are table chip leader, why would you want to take a high variance approach agaisnt a stack that can cripple you? If you put in a nice size re-raise (not a min raise here!!) vilain will fold most of the time and you will rake in a nice size pot, be a bigger table chip leader and be able to steal, resteal and simply pick up the chips from desperate all ins from short stacks. It does not look like you need to take the high variance approach here because you are already doing good. There are other situations where limping with AK and playing soft is a great approach but not here.