DECISION POINT: You are playing a live daily tournament with blinds at 50/100 and a 100 big blind ante. You’ve just been moved to a new table and are dealt A♠Q♣ in the Cutoff. Most stacks are around 50BBs and you have 100BBs. It folds around and you make a standard raise to 300. The Button folds, the Small Blinds moves all-in for 4,800, and the Big Blind folds. Action is on you, what do you do?

PRO ANSWER: We are playing a live daily tournament with around 80% of the field remaining and most stacks at around 50BBs. We’ve managed to run our stack up to 100BBs and have just been moved to a new table so all of the players are unknown to us. The blinds are 50/100 with a 100 big blind ante. We are dealt A♠Q♣ in the Cutoff. The preflop action folds around to us and we make a standard raise to 300. The Button folds and then the Small Blind moves all-in for 4,800 chips. The Big Blind folds and action is back on us.

Moving all-in for nearly 50 big blinds over a 3 big blind open isn’t a play we would see replicated in standard preflop charts or a solver. In real-time the first step is to think of what category of hands might want to make this play. Most likely, the Small Blind is using hands that they think are ahead of our opening range but don’t want to play out of position postflop. This likely includes big broadway hands like AK/AQ and mid pairs such as 88-JJ that figure to be best at the moment but will likely face a lot of difficulty playing out of position unless they really connect with the flop.

With that in mind, a good question to ask ourselves in this situation is “would my opponent ever do this with a hand I dominate?”.

Since we aren’t getting great pot odds (barely better than 1:1) we would want an edge over the Small Blind’s range, which is difficult to do if they never have hands we dominate. Given that we have AQ, this means we would need to believe our opponent is capable of raising all-in for 50BBs with hands such as AJ or KQ in order to believe we have a big enough edge to call here.

Against an unknown opponent, it seems unlikely that these hands would be in their range. If we had a read that the Small Blind was capable of having a wider range that would include hands like AJ/KQ/AT, then we could make an exploitative adjustment and call. However, without that opponent specific knowledge, this is a prudent spot to fold.

We should continue to monitor the player in the Small Blind and pay particular attention to their cards at showdown so we have a better idea of what their range looks like in similar situations in the future.

Folding is the best play.