DECISION POINT: You are in a $300 bounty tournament with $100 going towards the bounty. There are 120 left with 90 getting paid (min-cash is $325). Levels increase every 20 minutes and currently blinds are 500/1,000 with a 1,000 big blind ante. You are in the Big Blind with A♠J♦ and 11BBs. The Cutoff (with 30BBs) minraises to 2,000 and the Button moves all-in for their last 6BBs. The Small Blind folds and action is on you.

What do you do here?

PRO ANSWER: We are playing a live $300 buy-in bounty tournament with $100 going toward the bounty. There are still 120 players remaining with 90 getting paid and a min-cash being worth $325. The blinds are 500/1,000 with a 1,000 big blind ante. It’s a typical fast-structured daily tournament with 20 minute levels.

We are dealt AsJd in the Big Blind. Everyone folds to the Cutoff who makes a minimum raise to 2,000 chips. The Button, with six big blinds remaining, moves all-in for their last 6,000 chips. The Small Blind folds and action is on us.

Situations like this can feel a bit tricky because moving all-in is essentially calling off all our chips with AJo. The Cutoff will be getting a very good price to call once you factor in the potential for 2 bounties, so they are unlikely to be folding much, if any, of their range.

The fact that the Cutoff can make such a small raise here by risking 2,000 chips to win 2,500 preflop, along with the fact that they have some additional implied odds in the form of potential bounties from both us and the Button, means they should be opening even wider than in more straightforward scenarios.

Plugging this situation into a solver confirms our suspicion.

Without the presence of bounties the Cutoff should be opening around 32% of their range. Once you add the additional equity for the 2 bounties in play, that number increases to 38% of hands. The wide Cutoff opening range means that the Button should be moving all-in with around 20% of hands, which makes our AJo well ahead of both ranges. Add in the fact that we are eligible to collect the Button’s bounty when we win, and moving all-in has a positive expectation of nearly 2,500 chips which is a significant increase to our stack.

If we give the Cutoff and Button significantly tighter ranges this decision becomes much closer, but we would need opponent specific information that both players were playing ranges that are more than 50% tighter than they should theoretically be before we should even begin to consider folding.

This is a great spot where we have the opportunity to pick up a significant amount of chips and collect a potential bounty.

Moving all-in is the best play.