DECISION POINT: You are in the middle stages of a large field tournament with multiple short stacks at your table. Blinds are 500/1,000 with a 1,000 big blind ante and the UTG player, who you’ve observed as being loose and aggressive, moves all-in for 5,000. A Middle Position player calls and action folds to you on the Button with A♠J♣ and a 11K stack. What do you do here?

PRO ANSWER: We are in the middle stages of a large field multi-table tournament. The blinds are 500/1,000 with a 1,000 big blind ante. There are multiple short stacks at the table, including our stack of eleven big blinds. We are dealt AsJc on the Button and the UTG player, who we’ve observed as being loose and aggressive, moves all-in for 5,000. The Middle Position player next to act folds and MP2 just flat calls the all-in. Everyone else folds and action is on us.

On first instinct it can be very tempting to just go with this hand. We’re short and an offsuit broadway such as Ace Jack is likely to have pretty good equity vs a single short stacked all-in. The UTG player’s range here should be pretty wide and we should be well ahead of that, however we have to consider MP2’s range.

This call from MP2 represents quite a bit of strength if we consider the starting stacks and could easily represent hands as strong as aces and kings in this spot. Given how short the stacks left behind to act are they don’t necessarily mind getting action with these premium hands.

Running this spot in a simulator, MP2’s range is likely to look something like 66+/AT+ and if that’s the case, we have a clear fold as shoving here actually has an expectation of -2.52 big blinds. In many cases their range will be a little tighter, however even if we widen MP2’s range to start to include hands like A9/A8/KJs and lower pairs our expectation with AJo only increases to -1.36 big blinds.

This is a spot many players get wrong. When facing multiple all-ins with no ability to generate fold equity on our shove, many hands just won’t perform that well versus strong ranges. When an opponent in Middle Position flat calls an all-in shove from UTG, even against a looser player, the Middle Position player’s calling range is fairly narrow.

This play would actually be better if we had closer to 20,000 chips. With a slightly larger stack we could generate fold equity against some of the hands in Middle Position’s range that have reasonable equity against us and get heads up against the UTG’s wider range. Taking these factors into consideration with MP2’s almost certainly tighter flatting range, getting the chips in here is simply a losing play.

Folding is the best play.