no one has mentioned this yet..
but is anyone else here leading on the flop?

u can lead for 1/2 the ps here on the flop, then fold to a raise.... if ur flat called by 1 person, then just assume there on a draw and lead for 3/4 ps on the turn if any blanks show up..
if called by multiple people, then just try to check it down and keep the pot small.. or check/call if none of the draws hit or check fold if u believe ur beat.

cuz if ur planning to check-call a 1/2 ps bet on the flop, why not just lead for 1/2ps yourself? you will get more info this way

if u lead for 1/2 ps on the flop, and villian and MP flat called you, and u 2paired on the turn.. you can now lead for 3/4 - full ps bet on the turn with more confidence.
if ur bet gets raised on the flop, you can lay it down easily knowing villian has TP with a higher kicker or better

hey eclipse... I didn't consider leading out on the flop with top pair/weak kicker because the queen was very likely to be in the playing zone of at least one of the 6 preflop callers and, assuming that to be the case, I was almost certainly outkicked.

I had every intention of folding this flop to almost any bet. However, you have to understand the nature of this game. Although this was my first hand at this table, I have played $1/$2 NL at the Borgata many times. It is an action game. When players make their hands, they bet them hard, especially when the flop is multiway and presents several logical draws.

So that is the context into which you have to put the $5 bet into a $12 pot. For this game, that was an unusually small bet for the circumstances that I described (a more typical bet for someone who had made top pair/decent kicker would have been in the $10-$15 range for this game). It suggested a marginal hand to me, and while it was possible that the bettor was also playing top pair with a higher kicker, it was also possible that he was playing some kind of underpair, a hand that I could beat. I was willing to call such a small bet to find out if my read was correct, but I was still planning to fold if I did not improve, the board took a bad turn, or the betting started to get heavy.

I agree that this approach is passive, and it's not my usual style (e.g., I might have been more aggressive about leading out if the top flop card had been a 9 or a J and the action was only 3-way or heads up). But I just felt that it wasn't wise to invest a lot of money against a large field and a flop with multiple draws to get some information about how good my kicker was. The bottom line is that I was prepared to give up the $2 that I had invested from the BB if the action gave the slightest indication that top pair was no good.