DECISION POINT: You’ve made day 2 of a major live tournament series and are just inside of the money bubble and you have no significant reads on your table mates. Blinds are 4,000/8,000 with an 8,000 big blind ante and you are the short stack at the table with 20BBs. Action folds to the Button who raises to 20,000 (2.5BBs) and action is on you in the Small Blind with J♦9♦.

What do you do here?

PRO ANSWER: We are playing day 2 of a major live series event and are just inside of the money bubble. Blinds are 4,000/8,000 with an 8,000 big blind ante. We have exactly 20 big blinds while most of the rest of the table has between 30-50BBs. It is very early in day 2 so we have no significant reads on the other players at our table beyond their chip stacks. We are dealt J9s in the Small Blind. Everyone folds to the Button who opens to 20,000 and action is on us.

While J9s isn’t a premium hand, we have an ideal reshove stack against a wide range on the Button. If we move all-in we would be risking 154,000 to win 40,000, which is roughly a 25% increase to our stack. Anytime we can potentially increase our stack by 20-25% by just taking down a pot preflop the potential risk/reward behind reshoving starts to become extremely compelling.

When choosing to reshove we want to include hands that have significant blockers, reasonable equity when called, or some combination of the two. Our specific hand, J9s does often have reasonable equity when called, however we aren’t blocking much of the Button’s range.

If we had a read that our opponent was opening too wide a range of hands, or was folding more often than they should when we move all-in, a shove would be more compelling in this spot. This concept is often referred to as the “range gap” of our opponent. The bigger the difference is between the amount of hands the Button would open compared to the amount of hands they will call a reshove with, the wider range of hands we can use to reshove.

Without a read that the Button has a wider range gap than they should have in this particular spot, our hand isn’t quite good enough to shove. Using a solver confirms this as J9s has a -0.01 BB expectation as a reshove in this exact scenario.

Folding is the best play.