DECISION POINT: You are in an online daily tournament with blinds at 1,000/2,000 and a 2,000 big blind ante. Approximately 30% of the field is still in play and most players at your table have between 10-30 big blinds. Action folds to you in the Hijack with a 30K (15BB) stack and you raise 4,000. The Button 3-bets to 11,700, the Big Blind calls, and action is back on you.

What do you do here?

PRO ANSWER: We are in the later stages of a daily online tournament. There is around 30% of the field remaining and the blinds are at 1,000/2,000 with a 2,000 big blind ante. We started the hand with 30,000 chips (15 big blinds) with most of the players at our table having between 10-30 big blinds. We are dealt K♥J♥ in the Hijack seat and the action folds to us.

Suited broadway hands are quite strong at this stack depth, and we have the option to either make a small raise or move all-in for 15 big blinds total. We decide to make it 4,000, the Cutoff folds and the Button raises 11,700. The Small Blind folds and the Big Blind cold calls the 11,700, putting action back on us. KJs is a strong hand with only 15BBs left, and against just the Button or the Big Blind we would likely have to continue.

However, when the Button raises and the Big Blind cold calls this changes the situation tremendously. The Big Blind shouldn’t really be cold calling in this spot, however when they do it usually signifies a very narrow and condensed range that consists of pairs 99-QQ, sometimes KK/AA as a trap, and bigger broadway hands such as AK/AQ. Much of that range has us crushed, and we still have to contend with the Button’s range which could be a bit wider but is uncapped and still contains many hands that dominate us.

There is some dead money in the pot and with three players we only need around 30% equity to break even from a chip perspective. That being said, our hand is often dominated by one or both players and we still have a playable stack of 13 big blinds when we find the fold here. If we had some sort of read that the Big Blind calls incredibly loose in these situations we could start to consider continuing exploitatively. Against players with reasonable ranges our hand just doesn’t have enough equity to continue.

When we start to consider ICM implications at this stage of the tournament, retaining our seat in the tournament becomes much more valuable than taking a neutral to slightly negative chip EV shot to triple our stack.

Folding is the best play.