Not quite the Vegas recap, but still a recap

I had high hopes for New Years Eve. Waffles being the gentleman that he is, gave me a suggestion for how to spend the evening. Unfortunately, he's not quite classy enough to hang with my lady. He will need to pay find for himself someone to share an evening like that.

New Years Eve poker wise was in some ways, my best and worst poker. Yep, I lost a buy in, but I actually think I played some of my best poker in the process.

To make a long story short and to not go into some Hoy or Wafflesque bad beat story, I flopped top set 3 times and lost to runner runner gutter balls. In limit hold 'em with limited time, this is bound to happen. My window of opportunity in the card room was only one hour, which sucks. No momentum.

My best moment on the felt is still something I'm quite proud of. I still lost a bit of cash, I'd like to hear how you'd handle this.

I'm in late middle position. There is a raise from a loose player early, a reraise from a guy that appears drunk but I have seen before here and in the hole for me is AA. I have already gone down 3 times on flopped sets and shown so I figure I raise it here. Duh! It goes back to the first raiser, he raises and now the guy I've seen before raises it to cap. I call.

The flop comes K♥J♦5♥. I have two black aces. The original raiser checks. On previous hands, he'd cap it and check fold the flop. No big surprise there. The guy I've seen before raises, and again, this isn't any great surprise, he raises a lot, but this time he actually looked serious. Like he had something he wanted to protect.

Before I did anything, I really wanted to know where I was in the hand. I do have aces which can be a fairly big hand. I learned a while ago, that when I talk during a hand, I tend to give away too much information, but right now, I wanted to see where I was so I broke my silence just long enough to say something, "I know you couldn't have flopped top set with me, but are you on a big draw?"

It was funny, but his immediate reaction was to quickly look back at the board and his expression changed from calm to a quick "Oh shit!" In my heart, I knew he had JJ or 55. So instead of raising, I only called. I have only 1 good out and a backdoor straight draw and all of these are dodging one more heart. There were still others in the hand, this is $2/$4, but I knew where I was in the hand.

The turn was no help and added a diamond draw.  The guy I had seen before raises and I folded.

When the dealer called for a show down, I asked him to stop for a second and told him he had 2 5's. He turned them over and was a bit peeved. He asked after the hand what I had folded. I told him, two black aces. He proceeded to chastise me for folding such a huge hand. Only an idiot would fold aces.

I trusted my reads. They were right. This is the sick part of poker, it can sometimes be expensive to be right.