[drzen]

[ QUOTE ]
Early in a SNG with AQ utg I am raising. Not always a popular decision but calling just means you will end up with a lot of limpers and after the flop you have no idea where you are. Someone could have 10 3o for all I know. Even with AA you wouldn't know what you are up against without a pre flop raise.

If you raised you get a thinned out field and an idea on who might have what.

[/ QUOTE ]

That might be true in theory but in practice what you get is higher variance and still no idea where you are. Early in an SNG, I find that players will call raises with very much the same sorts of hands they would limp with. Yeah, you might knock out T3s, but QT will call a raise. If you raise more to get fewer callers, you've ended up putting a lot of chips in with a hand that needs to improve if you're going to be confident you're ahead. Also, psychologically, you're going to feel you have to cbet a lot of flops and before you know it, you've put in a ton of chips with ace high against players who will sometimes call a raise with nothing and a bet on the flop with the same hand.

I'm not saying you're wrong definitively. I think that both points of view have merit. I tend to like keeping pots small if I don't have a great hand because I think having 1700 chips is less of a positive than having 1300 is a negative, but YMMV.