DECISION POINT: In the late stages of a Tournament where blinds are 6,000/12,000 with a 12,000 big blind ante both Middle Position players fold and you raise to 30,000 from the Hijack with J♠J♣. The Cutoff folds and the Button reraises to 100,000. The Blinds fold and action is on you. What do you do here?

PRO ANSWER: In a multi-table Tournament with 6,000/12,000 blinds with a 12,000 big blind ante we are dealt pocket jacks in the Hijack seat. It folds around to us and considering the strength of our hand and our position we make a standard raise to 30,000. The Cutoff folds and then the Button makes it 100,000. It folds back around to us and we are faced with a decision.

One orbit previous to this hand we witnessed our opponent raise with KJo in a similar situation then called when their opponent 4-bet. We want to be careful not to draw too many conclusions based on one hand. However, given what we observed that they would call a 4-bet with KJo, which is at the very least the bottom of their overall range of hands, we can assume our JJ has just over 63% equity vs a hand range that includes KJo, ATo as well as all hands better than those and all pocket pairs.

Equity of 63% is just too much for us to consider folding in this spot even if we have very little fold equity and our opponent has us covered.

Situations like these often feel really tough because we are essentially calling off our tournament life. When we have a 60%+ equity edge we must realized that this is a monster edge. Absent some sort of very tournament specific reasons, such as it being a satellite or some very unique bubble situations where you’re both huge stacks, this is simply too big of an edge to pass up.

In these situations we must embrace the fact that we have a huge edge and the amount of chips, if we win, can propel us to a very strong finish.

Moving all-in is the best play.

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