[Sunny Mehta]

Obviously things are very situation dependent, and also, having a good image can play a part in how strongly you can get away with playing queens preflop. But in general, even though I can play pretty LAG at times, I've always played queens pretty cautiously before the flop. I just don't think preflop is the place to gun it out with that hand. Most of the time your equity is pretty marginal when a lot of chips go into the pot. (Save for the times you can include a decent number of dominated hands in your opponent's range when a lot of money goes in. And that's usually not the case, particularly in nitty online games.)

If you play them more passively preflop, then in those favorable spots where you actually have an overpair and someone else has a smaller one (or TPTK or something), nobody puts you on queens and you end up making money against hands that might've either folded preflop to a big reraise, or been suspicious postflop. And if you hit a crappy flop (ace or king, highly coordinated middle cards, etc), you get away cheaper.

I definitely acknowledge the other side, which is that if your opponents will not fold their dominated range to pf 3- and 4-bets, then getting a bigger preflop pot does behoove you. And the latter might certainly be true in a lot of shorthanded games where ranges are wider, etc.

However, I thought I'd play devil's advocate to the argument of blindly willing to raise and reraise preflop with queens like they're the nizzles.

-S