DECISION POINT: In the middle stages of a large field daily multi-table tournament where blinds are 3,000/6,000 with a 6,000 big blind ante and the average stack is 15BBs, action folds around to you in the Hijack with 13BBs and 7♠7♦.

What do you do here?

PRO ANSWER: We are in the middle stages of a large field daily multi-table tournament. The blinds are 3,000/6,000 with a 6,000 big blind ante. There are varying stack sizes around the table but most players are in the 10-20 big blind range.

We are dealt 7♠7♦ in the Hijack seat and action folds to us. Our hand is far too strong to fold. So the main question is if we should make a standard raise to around 2BBs-2.2BBs or open shove all-in.

Unless we flop a set, middle pocket pairs can be extremely tricky to play postflop. There will almost always be at least one overcard, which means that against trickier opposition we often will be left guessing whether to continue postflop or just give up on our hand when we meet resistance.

Using a solver to analyze this spot confirms our suspicion. In a scenario where we assume all players in the hand are using perfect strategy, open shoving shows an average profit of around 8,000 chips while raising to 12,000 shows an average profit of around 7,500 chips.

We also must factor in that if we were to just raise a standard amount it is far more likely we will make postflop mistakes against good opponents, given how tricky our hand will be to navigate to showdown postflop.

If however, we had a read that our opponents weren’t tricky and tended to play quite straightforward postflop, we could exploitatively raise instead of moving all-in. Against all other opponents moving all-in is best.

Moving all-in is the best play.