DECISION POINT: You are in the middle stages of a large field tournament where blinds are 800/1,600 with a 1,600 big blind ante and you are one of the short stacks at the table. The action folds to the Hijack who limps. You call from the Button with 5♠6♠, the Small Blind completes, and the Big Blind checks. On the K♠5♥6♥ flop both Blinds check, Hijack leads out to 2,400, and action is on you.

What do you do here?

PRO ANSWER: We are the middle stages of a large field multi-table tournament. The blinds are 800/1,600 with a 1,600 big blind ante. We are one of the shortest stacks at the table with 43,800 chips which equates to a stack of 25-30 big blinds.

Action folds to the Hijack who open limps. The Cutoff folds, and with 5s6s on the Button we could make a case for raising here to isolate what is likely a weak Hijack open limping range. If the Blinds are aggressive players who are likely to raise limped pots frequently, an isolation raise with our suited connectors would be the preferred line.

However, if the Blinds are more passive this is a great spot to take a cheap flop with a speculative hand in a situation where the pot is likely to be multiway. We don’t have any strong reads on the blinds and so we decide to call. The Small Blind completes the Big Blind checks.

The flop is Ks5h6h and we flop bottom two-pair plus a backdoor flush draw. The Blinds check to the Hijack who bets 2,400 into the 8,000 chip pot. This is a spot where it can be quite tempting to slowplay, however in a multiway pot on a board with multiple draws slowplaying can be disastrous.

We likely have the best hand at this point with two-pair with an effective SPR (stack to pot ratio) of just over 5. This is the type of flop we are likely to get action on, and maximizing value with big hands in tournaments is one of the keys to building a stack and making deep runs. The main debate here isn’t if we should raise, but to how much.

The Hijack’s hand range in this spot can include offsuit broadway combos such as KTo plus suited combos like A3hh or 78s, and potentially even pocket pairs such as 77/88. If we make a huge raise here we are unlikely to get action from the weaker part of the Hijack’s range, but we make it harder for them to call profitably with most draws. If we raise smaller we encourage action from many more second best hands, but also give a good price for the drawing hands in Hijack’s range.

If the SPR was closer to 3 we could make a better case for a big raise because winning the pot now would be a bigger priority since it would represent a third of our stack. While the pot is still significant in this spot, when the SPR is larger maximizing value on our big hands starts to become a bigger priority than just winning right now.

Making a smallish raise to around 7,000 chips allows us to build a pot as well as extract value from many of the weaker parts of the Hijack’s range. We will potentially have tough decisions if a card like the Th comes on the turn, however this is a reasonable risk to potentially win a big pot. By just calling this flop bet we would likely allow too many hands with decent equity behind us to get in for cheap.

Raising to around 7,000 is the best play.