DECISION POINT: You are in a multi-table tournament with 500/1,000 blinds and a 1,000 big blind ante. The Under the Gun player folds and you raise from UTG+1 to 2,500 with A♦A♥. Action folds to the Big Blind who reraises to 10,000 and you call. Your opponent leads for 5,500 on the 7♥2♣K♥ flop and action is on you. What do you do here?

PRO ANSWER: We are in the middle stages of a large field multi-table tournament. The blinds are 500/1,000 with a 1,000 big blind ante and we are dealt AdAh UTG+1. The UTG player folds, we open to a standard raise of 2,500 (2.5 big blinds) and everyone folds to the Big Blind who reraises to 10,000 (10 big blinds).

In this situation it can be tempting to just move all-in with our pocket aces preflop. When stacks are much deeper we would definitely prefer to reraise, but at this stack depth of just over 40BB to start the hand it is actually more beneficial to just call with our aces. There are two main factors that make calling is better than 4-bet shoving in this spot.

First, by flat calling with pocket aces we help protect our entire calling range. If we are capable of flatting with aces here in addition to some of the other hands we want to call with such as KQs or AQs our opponents will likely proceed with caution.

Second, the SPR (stack to pot ratio) when we call will be just below 2. This makes it very easy for the rest of the chips to go in postflop, and since we will be in position it’s much easier for us to guarantee that betting happens appropriately postflop in order to get stacks all-in.

We decide to just call and the flop is 7h2cKh and the Big Blind bets into us for 5,500 or around 25% of the pot. Given there is a flush draw on the board and we have a strong hand that could be vulnerable, it may seem reasonable to get all the chips in now. However, if we pause a moment and take a deeper look it’s likely our opponent is betting their entire range on this board.

This king high board with a fairly dry texture is very favorable for the Big Blind’s range. While they will be 3-betting with some suited combos here, flush draws actually make up a very small percentage of their overall range.

Hands like Th9h just won’t be 3-betting us very often preflop and since we have the Ah we block most of their flush draws. On the rare occasion the Big Blind has a flush draw and it hits, we do have a redraw to the nuts on the river so we’re not completely drawing dead.

This is a perfect opportunity to continue slowplaying with our pocket aces. Any meaningful bet on the turn is going to pot commit our opponent and allow us to extract max value. A big part of winning multi-table tournaments is extracting the maximum value and winning the biggest pots possible with our big hands.

Calling is the best play.