Bad Online MTT Play

No Limit SNGs and MTTs are going terrible for me lately. It seems people call me with way the worst of it yet get there and beat me anyway. Case in point is this hand from a 6-max MTT yesterday. (Warning, Warning a bead beat story is about to be told, if you have small children or are overly sensitive please leave the room.) BTW this is a true hand; the hole cards are close to exactly what happened. We are both deep with the blinds at 100-200 with a 25 Ante. I start the hand with 12K and he starts with 9.5K. I bring it in for 3x under the gun with pocket Aces. The villain calls on the button and we see a flop of 8-4-2 rainbow, pretty much a very dry flop. I C-bet for ½ of the pot and he snap calls me. Being he’s a total lagtard figured he had a hand like 3-5 or 5-6 suited. The turn brings a Jack and I c-bet again for close to 2/3 the pot. At this point I have around 8K left in my stack. He snap calls me again so I am putting him on some kind of a goofy draw. The river brings a harmless looking 7 and I think there is no way I am getting any value out of my Aces in this spot so I check. He snap shoves on me which doesn’t make any sense to me. I can fold and have 8K left or I can call his 5.5K shove and have a chance for a huge stack going deep in the MTT. I go into the tank and decide to call his shove. What does he have you think? Of course he has the nuts with 9-10 off. Remember back to the flop it was 8-4-2, so he called my flop bet with no pair, no draw! This kind of BS has been happening to me with too much regularity lately. Trust me he wasn’t floating me on the flop to take it away later. This was a low limit MTT and villain wasn’t even a level 1 thinker. Looking back on the hand I should have folded to his river shove. Is this results oriented thinking or smart conservative play? Reason I should have folded is that this player was playing any 2 random cards and could easily have me beat by any crappy 2 pair type of hand. I had a nice stack in this one all the way from level 1 of this large field MTT. We had started with 6000 players and were down to around 900, with around 700 finishing in the money. I could have coasted into the money within the next 15 mins. but wanted to true for a very large stack. This style never works for me, that is trying to build up a large stack. What works for me is lagging into the money and than trying to build up me chips. In the last few weeks I have tried to be more aggressive and have nothing but a ton of close to the money finishes to show for it. Am I being short-term results oriented or am I on to something in todays minefield type donkaments? Thanks for reading and good luck at the tables. Tony