DECISION POINT: You are in the early stages of a fast structured daily tournament with blinds at 75/150. Many of the players already have less than 10BBs and a few stacks have 40-50BBs. Both Early Position players, the Hijack, and the Button limp. The Small Blind completes and action is on you in the Big Blind with A♠6♠.

What do you do here?

PRO ANSWER: We are in the early stages of a daily tournament with 75/150 blinds and no ante. It’s a fast structure with many players already having fewer than 10 big blinds and a few larger stacks with 40-50 big blinds. We are dealt A♠6♠ in the Big Blind.

The UTG player limps and is followed by the UTG+1, Hijack, Button, and Small Blind, and action is on us. The 900 chips currently in the pot represent almost 75% of our stack so if we could shove and win all the chips this would be a tremendous spot. While shoving initially may seem like a potentially viable move, UTG+1 and the Small Blind both have around 900 chips behind, so they will be getting better than 2:1 on a call. The remaining stacks at the table are all much deeper and would subsequently be getting a good price to call if we shove.

If we have table or player specific reads that lead us to believe we would have a reasonable chance of taking this pot down preflop, or even reduce the field to a single opponent who has a wider range, shoving here would be a great play.

Without that knowledge however, we have little reason to believe an all-in will generate folds with a reliable frequency. In addition, by playing passively preflop we can check and see a free flop and have implied odds when we connect with the board and get our chips in, while having stress free folds on flops when we miss entirely.

Consulting a solver here the majority play is to check. It is important to make a distinction here that the solver output is likely not as useful in this spot, as the assumption is that players are limping GTO ranges which are unlikely to be similar to ranges used in a low stakes daily tournament. If we had any intuition based on table dynamics or players specific information that we could get the majority of if not all of our opponents to fold when we shove over these limps, shoving would quickly become a preferred play.

Without knowledge of specific player tendencies at this table, the best play would be to check and see a flop and then get all-in if we flop any reasonable amount of equity.

Checking is the best play.