DECISION POINT: You are in a large field online tournament with blinds at 7,500/15,000 and a 15,000 big blind ante. There are 250 players remaining and 185 places are paid. You have 650,000 (43.5BBs) and are currently in 40th chip position. The UTG player (with 18.5BBs) min-raises to 30,000, it folds to you in the Cutoff with K♠J♠ and you call. Action folds to the Big Blind (with 11.5BBs), they also call the minraise and the flop comes A♠Q♠K♣. The UTG player c-bets 30,000, you call, and the Big Blind moves all-in for 155,000 (10.5BBs). UTG puts the rest of their stack in the middle and action is on you.

What do you do here?

PRO ANSWER: We are playing a large field online tournament. 250 players remain and 185 get paid. We currently sit in 40th chip position with 650,000 chips. The blinds are 7,500/15,000 with a 15,000 big blind ante. We are dealt K♠J♠ in the Cutoff.

The UTG player min-raises to 30,000 and action folds to us. Our hand has great equity in position against a min-raise from Under The Gun. A reasonably sized 3-bet would be committing our stack preflop against the Big Blind or UTG player if they moved all-in. Our hand also plays perfectly fine if we get a few more callers and have to play multiway. We elect to call and everyone else folds except the Big Blind who also calls.

The flop is A♠Q♠K♣, which gives us middle pair plus both a nut flush and nut straight draw. The Big Blind checks and the UTG player continuation bets 30,000 chips. We could consider raising in this spot, however against UTG’s range there aren’t many dominated hands that are likely to fold to our aggression. If they have hands like QQ+/AQ+ we'll end up playing a huge pot with around 43% equity. We are getting excellent immediate pot odds to call (better than 4:1) and likely have significant implied odds against UTG’s range in position.

Choosing the passive approach, we elect to call. The Big Blind then moves all-in for 155,000 and the UTG player also goes all-in for the rest of their 250,000 chip stack. So much for not having to play a large pot.

Now we are facing a decision to call 220,000 more to win 547,500. That means we’re getting around 2.5:1 pot odds so we need around 29% equity for this to be a breakeven call from a chip expected value (Chip EV) perspective. A useful way to approach this calculation is to determine the likely worst case scenario for opponent holdings when we call.

When up against exactly AA and JT offsuit combos where the Ten is a spade, we still have 30.5% equity. Purely from a chip expected value perspective, when our KJ suited is up against the two strongest combos in UTG’s range we have enough equity to call. If we assume more realistic ranges where UTG has QQ+/AQ+/JT and the BB has AQ/JT plus Ts9s to represent some of their flush draws and semi-bluffs, our equity increases to 39%.

We could consider passing on this spot when the table is so soft that we’re easily able to chip up in very low risk situations. Our equity edge in this hand is significant however, and even the times we lose this hand we have over 20 big blinds remaining.

Absent a table specific situation where the table is so soft we feel we can comfortably pick up uncontested pots, we cannot fold.

Calling is the best play.