DECISION POINT: In the early stages of a multi-table tournament with blinds at 75/150 you are one of the shortest stacks at an active table and you open raise to 500 from Early Position with A♠K♦. The action folds around to the Hijack (who is the short stack) and they 3-bet to 1,100. The Button calls and both Blinds fold. Action is on back you, what do you do here?

PRO ANSWER: We are in the early stages of a large field multi-table tournament. The blinds are 75/150 and we are Under the Gun with 30 big blinds and one of the shortest stacks at the table aside from the Hijack who has 14 big blinds.

With a premium hand in early position we definitely want to come in for a raise. A bet in the 375-450 range is fairly standard at most tables but at a very active table we could make it slightly more to try and thin the field. This table definitely can be labeled as an active table based on our observation so we raise to 500 chips.

The action folds to the Hijack who reraises to 1,100. The Button cold calls and the action folds back to us. If this were a soft table where stacks were extremely deep we could potentially make a case for just calling or even folding here exploitatively, but at 30 big blinds effective our hand is just too strong to lay down. By just calling we have to take a multiway flop out of position with only 1,000 chips behind.

The Button is also unlikely to just flat the 3-bet in this spot with a strong range. It is much more likely some sort of condensed range such as 66-TT or hands like AJs/KQs.

It’s possible if we shove here that the Hijack calls and the Button folds, which would be huge as we’d get to play heads up with a lot of dead money in the pot with one of the five best starting hands in poker. Even if the Button calls, it is likely we either have them dominated with our AK, or we are roughly a coin flip for the side pot.

Moving all-in will put our tournament life on the line, but to win poker tournaments we must accumulate chips and we are unlikely to run across many spots more +EV than this given the current stack sizes and likely hand ranges.

Moving all-in is the best play.