DECISION POINT: You are in a daily tournament where blinds are 1,000/2,000 with a 2,000 big blind ante and the average stack is around 60,000 chips (30BBs). You’ve just returned from break and only 5 other players are seated. Action folds around to you with A♥T♥ on the Button and you raise to 5,000. The Small Blind folds and the Big Blind calls. The flop comes A♦5♥3♥ and your opponent leads for 20,000 chips.

Action is on you, what do you do here?

PRO ANSWER: We are in the middle stages of a daily tournament. It is right after break and only 6 players have returned to their seats. The blinds are 1,000/2,000 with a 2,000 big blind ante and the average stack is around 60,000 chips. The action folds to us on the Button and we look down at A♥T♥. We make a 2.5x raise first-in to 5,000, the Small Blind folds, and the Big Blind calls.

The flop is A♦5♥3♥ giving us top pair and the nut flush draw. To our surprise, the Big Blind leads into us for 20,000 chips, or just under 2x the pot. In theory, our opponent in the Big Blind isn’t supposed to lead much on this board. When they do, the psychology behind their bet usually indicates one of two mindsets:

1) Bet now so that we don’t have to face potentially difficult decisions on the turn and river. Hand categories that might lead with a big bet in this scenario include draws or weaker hands that want to avoid tough decisions when facing bets postflop so they remove that potential by putting money into the pot now.

2) We might not get action if we check and we don’t want to give a free card. Particularly on a flop that is highly coordinated and has multiple visible draws, many players will choose to take this line.

We are way ahead of all the hands that fit into category one. There are a few hands in category two that may be ahead of us, they are rare as most of the bigger hands containing an Ace such as AK would have reraised us preflop. While the Big Blind will have some two-pair hands on this board, they also have several worse made hands such as A9o/A2/A4 and even against many of their two-pair hands we have significant equity.

Getting all the chips in on the flop is never going to be a bad play, as we will have significant equity against practically all hands in their range. We have a good chance to win a 33,000 chip pot with 55,000 chips in our stack, and winning this hand would be a huge boost to our chances in this tournament.

One potentially negative side effect of shoving is that moving all-in will certainly force out all of the hands that are essentially drawing dead such as weaker heart combinations. If the Big Blind ever folds hands such as Jh9h when we shove all-in over their flop lead, it is pretty catastrophic for us.

Moving all-in definitely shows a profit here, however when we closely analyze our opponent’s range, calling is a better play.

Calling is the best play.