Re-raising from early position with big hands like AQ and AK suited.

My dilema is this. Obviously these hands have the potential of of making huge hands like nut flushes and straights and you would want a few extra customers when this happens (smooth call an early raise). However most of the time you will be making hands like top pair top kicker and want to be playing heads up or against only two opponents (re-raise an early raiser to isolate). Is this just one of those situations where you mix up your play? I would like to know what some of you think and how you approach this situation. Thanks.

the suitedness of a big drawing hand like AK and AQ makes preflop only a 2% difference in hand equity preflop i would almost always , void of any table reads, be 3 betting these hands in either 6 max or 9 max it doesn't make a difference really. Like you said you don't wanna have a big multiway pot with a hand that on the wrong flops could be vulnerable to a lot of the draw out there. We would like to not have to push multiway on a flop with top pair top kicker if we could help it. I see what you are trying to get at, we would love to be able to hide our strength slightly so i would only like flatting if we know the table is quite nitty and they will almost surely fold out, or we think we can induce a 3 bet to come over the top that may think our flat was weak. The problem with these hands our the only really hidden hand we can get most of the time is top two. The st8 hits its hard to hide, the flush hits it is hard to hide, unless they have a very strong hand we aren't getting a huge amount of chips out of trying to mix it up. I know im being very general and we can come up with specific cases where it may be a higher equity play but the majority of the time imo post flop you probably get payed off a similar amount, and it opens up an image that you reraise strong so maybe you can mix in drawing hands that way but i am having a hard time to come up with good reasons to justifing flatting a ton because you are strong so why not bet out, unless opener is a total nitty old man and hasn't opened early in literally 3 hours of play i guess. The problem i see is we only get or nut flushes payed off by weaker flushes that think they may be good, in which case it just depends on if they have a good enough hand to stack off, or we hit st8's against top pairs or draws. I just think you go ahead and isolate like 90% to almost 100% of the time

Maybe... but you also get to peel more flops, see more turns, see more rivers, and have tons more reasons to continue with the hand postflop, which is huge in LHE.

9 or 10 handed...utg or utg+1 opens for a raise, it folds to you. ditching AQ suited or not every time here will never be that wrong even the times it is wrong. if there is a call or two after the raise before it gets to me i might just cold call here. the worse the players are who are involved in the pot the more inclined you should be to get involved also.

but yea, to recap and generalize about AQ, you don't want to be playing it HU against an early position raiser at a full ring table.

of course if it folds to somebody in the middle and they raise and i'm in the co or button with AQ i will often 3 bet them. this does depend on the player though, some full ring players are so nitty you can actually fold here.

AKs and AKo should generally just always be played preflop the same way you would play QQ+.