Sorry for the estimated hand history, I've been wanting to post about this hand but the files for some of my HHs seem corrupted or something.

Villain was a maniac, something like 90/50 over ~150 hands, and CBet the flop about 80% of the time.

MP and CO were more loose passive types, both around 40/7.

Hero (~250BBS) is SB with AK99
Villain(~400bbs) is BB.

Preflop: UTG Folds. MP (~300BBS) limps, CO (~350BBS) limps, Button folds, Hero Completes, villain raises pot. MP Calls, CO calls, Hero Calls.

Flop: (~32BBS) A44
Hero Checks, Villain bets pot, MP folds, CO folds. Hero Raises pot, Villain mucks.

Here's my thinking through the hand, for you all to pick apart:

So first, preflop. This is a decent speculative hand, but I'm out of position and don't want to bloat the pot with three people behind me when I will have to check fold a lot anyway. Besides, villain is going to pop it up 90% of the time, so there will be plenty in there when I hit, and if I raise into him, he would probably 3bet, aggravating the problem of playing a big pot OOP against him and two other players, who were going to call my raise and his three be more often than not.

Flop: When this flop comes down, I know that villain is going to bet it. He has been betting every paired board and cbetting most flops in general. My check here seems like a no brainer, since Villain is so likely to bet the flop, I effectively get to play this flop as if I'm on the button, because much more important information than his cbet is the reactions of the MP and CO, if one of them raises or calls, I can assume a 4 or full house is there more often than not and just throw my hand away.

Now after MP and CO fold, I am just left with the very likely to be bluffing villain. My hand is very likely to be good against him, so I repot, and end up taking down the pot.

Thinking about this in retrospect though, it seems like it wasn't the right play. If the AK is good, he's folding bluffs, and if he does have the 4 or a full house, he's calling or GII. If I also take into account the ~220BB effective stacks remaining, this seems spewy long term.

And supposing he is really bluffing, this kind of board reduces his ability to improve to a winner to a more limited set of possibilities than usual, like being able to catch the A-5 straight, spike some random set for a FH, and then just runner-runner stuff.

So what do you guys think?

Agree with my preflop thinking and flop check?

Would you just call down here to try and snap him off?

Yeah raising is a mistake here. He doesn't have a lot of draws other than 235. If you reraise, he's basically never calling with worse other than that, and probably not folding better. This is a call most of the time, or a fold depending on V.

Pre is fine,but don`t like pot raising with any hand specially ak here.Don`t bluff with medium strength hand.Against a maniac looks like standard call.

On this texture against a psb with these SPRs, a minraise is sufficient -- when you should raise, that is.

Thanks for the responses, folks. Seems like people agree that a raise was wrong here.

In a situation like this, I guess the only real play, assuming we think villain will barrel multiple times, is to call/call/call, just accepting the fact that we will occasionally be wrong or get outdrawn?

Could I get an example of when you think we should raise?