We all know about standard betting - 2xbb in EP, 3x in mid, 4x in late etc but what confuses me is cash play as I find it hard to read/define hands as betting seems to go out of the window. I have also noticed it when reading hand histories on this site and in magazine articles.

Here is a case in point, from Cardrunners:

.25/.50 NLHE

Hero is dealt QA spades. UTG limps, CO raises to $2 and that is 4xbb. So far, so standard.

Hero though decides to reraise to £6.5!!!! That's 13% of his stack.
That's the equivalent of raising 80 to 260 of your 2000 chips at the 10/20 stage of a tourney. Unheard of!

Even allowing for the fact that his opponents may be LAG, that seems extreme. If I held anything less than KK or AA (in which case, I am not letting go no matter what, pre flop) then I'd feel hard pressed to do anything other than call. JJ, 99, KA are all looking rather weak faced with such a reraise.

And I just can't get my head around it. I am aggressive myself, but I wouldn't reraise to such a degree with just AQ (and from the way the article is written, he wasn't trying to represent AA). Further more the villain, who is not painted to be a donk, flat calls (yet only has 10 8 off suit).

And this raises 2 points:
1) should I be overtly aggressive with premium hands in cash? As said, I usually follow the standard betting patterns and
2) considering such aggression, how do you calibrate where you are in a hand?