DECISION POINT: You are in the middle stages of a multi-table tournament where blinds are at 500/1,000 with a 1,000 big blind ante. The action folds to the Hijack who limps, the Button calls, and the Small Blind folds. You have A♥K♦ in the Big Blind with a 22BB starting stack, what do you do here?

PRO ANSWER: We are in the middle stages of a multi-table tournament with the blinds at 500/1,000 with a 1,000 big blind ante. We are dealt AhKd in the Big Blind. It folds to the Hijack who open limps with over 80BBs and the Button flat calls with over 40BBs. We have nearly 22BBs to start and action is on us.

Without some sort of read that Hijack only limps monster hands this is a pretty clear raise for us, the only real question is how much.

Just shoving all-in here is definitely an option. There are 4,500 chips in the middle already and adding over 20% to our stack uncontested is a great result. However, when dealing with players that open limp in middle to late position, they often are doing so because they just want to “see a flop”.

A very profitable play that is a bit higher variance than shoving is to raise to around one third of our stack, in this case around 7,000 chips. Against a single caller we will have a little under a pot sized bet left, and since we are first to act postflop we can just shove any flop.

Often, since the Hijack player just wants to “see a flop” anyway, they will call our raise with a wide range and on average either miss the flop or when we both hit we are significantly ahead and they frequently fold the flop, netting us an extra 6,000 chips when that happens. The risk is that sometimes our opponent will call with a hand they would have folded to an all-in preflop, hit the flop, and end up knocking us out of the tournament.

With an awkward stack of 20-25 big blinds this is often worth the risk to pick up extra chips since going from ~22k to ~26.5k isn’t a huge difference for us in the tournament. However, going from ~22k to ~32.5k is more more significant as at 30+ big blinds we will have far more tools at our disposal moving forward.

Table specific dynamics could impact our decision here. If we just lost a big all-in but the table is frequently allowing us to steal preflop then taking additional risk here is likely a mistake.

However, without that information we are at a stack depth where taking on a little extra risk to increase our stack by potentially almost another third is easily worth it.

Raising to 7,000 if the best play.