DECISION POINT: You are in the early stages of a daily online tournament with blinds at 10/20 and no ante. Play has been very active and loose with most stacks at the table near the 2,500 starting stack. The UTG player limps, UTG+1 raises to 90, and action folds around to you on the Button with A♦A♠. You reraise to 320, the Big Blind calls, and both Early Position players call. On the Q♠J♣T♦ flop it checks around to the UTG+1 player who goes all-in for 2,205.

Action is on you, what do you do here?

PRO ANSWER: We are playing in the early stages of a daily online tournament. The play has been pretty active and loose so far and most players are still near their 2,500 starting stack. The blinds are 10/20 with no ante. Theoretically, with no ante everyone should be playing tighter ranges, however we’ve observed several opponents playing ranges wider than they should given the situation.

We are dealt A♦A♠ on the Button. The UTG player limps for 20, UTG+1 makes it 90 chips, and everyone else folds to us. Our hand definitely prefers to raise and not allow multiple players to see the flop cheaply. A standard reraise is usually 3x the initial raise plus an additional amount to account for previous callers. In this case that would be a total raise of around 290 chips. Given that this table has been playing pretty loose we opt to make it a little larger and raise to 320. Even with the increased raise size we still get calls from the Big Blind, UTG, and UTG+1.

On the Q♠J♣T♦ flop both the Big Blind and UTG check and UTG+1 moves all-in for a huge overbet of 2,205 chips. The first step to deciding how to respond to this shove is to put our opponent on a hand range. Considering the preflop action and the fact that we hold two cards that are ace blockers, it’s very unlikely anyone has AK.

Additionally if the UTG+1 player had AK they would likely want to check and try to induce a bet rather than just move all-in. This makes UTG+1’s range much more likely to include several pair + flush draw hands as well as some two-pair hands. It’s possible they might play some pairs including TT-QQ this way as well, although those hands are strong enough we would expect them to check the flop at least some portion of the time. Taking these factors into account, if our opponent has a hand range of KTs+, QTs+, JTs, QQ-TT we are still over 43% against that range.

Our hand has a lot of equity and will be the best hand on the flop a fair portion of the time. The times we don’t have the best hand on the flop we still have a lot of equity versus even the hands that are currently ahead. We have solid outs including four kings that can make the nuts plus several other cards that improve our hand against two-pair and we can still make a set of aces. If we believe UTG+1 would ever overbet with a draw such as A9s/T9s or would potentially shove the flop with a pair and big draw such as KK, our equity goes up to nearly 47%.

Since this is early in the tournament and there is very little ICM pressure we should make decisions that are very close to Chip Expected Value. While we do have to factor in the slight chance that UTG or the Big Blind could be slowplaying a big hand, there shouldn’t be many big hands aside from 98s in their ranges considering the preflop action. We have to call 2,205 to win 3,495 meaning we only need 40% equity to continue.

If the table was super soft or we had some specific read that the UTG+1 player would just never make this huge overshove on the flop without 2-pair or better, we could fold. Since the table has been observed to be playing very loose and splashy, we simply have too much equity to fold pocket aces with so much money already in the pot.

We can expect to have the best hand reasonably often, and even when behind on the flop we have plenty of outs to improve.

Calling is the best play.