DECISION POINT: You are in the middle stages of a big field World Poker Tour tournament where blinds are 150/300 with a 25 chip ante and no significant opponent reads. An Early Position player raises to 1,225, it folds to you in the Cutoff with A♥Q♥ and you call. The Button and both Blinds fold and the flop comes T♥4♦8♥. Your opponent c-bets 3,075 and action is on you.

What do you do here?

PRO ANSWER: We are in the middle stages of a big field multi-table tournament. The blinds are 150/300 with a 25 chip ante and there are no significant reads on our table. We are dealt AhQh in the Cutoff and the player Under the Gun opens to 1,225 chips. Everyone else folds and we’re faced with our first decision.

Against a more standard 2.5-3BB raise we could easily reraise for value here. When facing a larger preflop raise sizing the Under the Gun player should be utilizing a narrower range to open since their risk to pick up the blinds is much greater. We can make solid cases for both 3-betting and calling here, and if we knew the UTG player was super tight we could even fold.

The Button and Big Blind have smaller stacks so it is unlikely we will get 3-bet bluffed since neither player has enough chips to generate significant fold equity with a shove. In particular, if we know this opponent is passive, calling here makes more sense as we get to play heads up and are in position with a reasonable amount of chips behind. We do call and everyone else folds.

The flop is Th4d8h and our opponent continuation bets 3,075. On this type of board that is highly coordinated and favors the preflop caller’s range, large bets like this are usually indicative of some sort of hand that is seeking protection like JJ+ or ATs. It’s also possible that they are c-betting as a semi-bluff with a heart draw or QJs even though we block many of the more significant combinations.

With a flush draw and two over cards here we often have 12 outs and sometimes have as many as 15. Since we would expect the UTG player to do this with hands like QQ/KK we can’t always count on both overcards as clean outs, however at least one will likely be clean.

With 12 outs we have around 45% equity making us only a slight underdog. In some cases we are actually the favorite with ace high (versus other flush draws) or 50/50 against hands like JJ!

While any action that we take aside from folding here is likely +EV, we don’t need to generate much fold equity at all for a shove here to show a massive profit. At this stage of the tournament we would be more than happy to add nearly 50% to our stack when the UTG player folds, and when they call we’re in decent shape to double up.

If the stacks were much deeper like in most cash games or earlier levels of a tournament, then just calling in position and playing out the turn/river would make more sense. Given the effective stack in this hand is 50BB, moving all-in now to potentially pick up a big chunk of chips uncontested is a great opportunity for us.

Moving all-in is the best play.