DECISION POINT: You are deep in a multi-table tournament with blinds at 1,500/3,000 with a 3,000 big blind ante. Both Under The Gun players, the Cutoff, and Button limp into the pot. You raise from the Small Blind with A♣Q♣ to 25,000. The Big Blind folds and you get called by all four limpers. Five way on the A♠8♣5♣ flop action is on you. What do you do here?

PRO ANSWER: We are deep in a multi-table tournament with 1,500/3,000 blinds with a 3,000 big blind ante. We have nearly a 40BB stack and are dealt AcQc in the Small Blind. Under The Gun and UTG+1 both call and it folds around to the Cutoff and Button who both call.

Preflop we actually have a very compelling case to just complete here and take the 13:1 immediate pot odds with a hand that plays reasonably well multiway. We could even make a case for just open shoving with AQ suited as we can add 20% to our stack with a hand that is likely ahead of most limping ranges if we aren’t called, although when our shove does get called we are often dominated.

At tables where players tend to play quite fit or fold on the flop we can make a standard raise here to around 24,000 to attempt to thin the field and will have a good chance to take it down on with a c-bet on many flops. We elect to take the latter route and raise to 25,000 and surprisingly we are called by everyone but the Big Blind.

The flop is As8c5c and we flop top pair, top kicker plus the nut flush draw. Often in a 5-way pot top pair will not be the best hand at showdown, however in this case there are specific factors we need to consider that make a compelling case to take our 1-pair hand to showdown.

The pot is 131,000 and we only have 92,000 behind. That means giving up our equity in this hand is catastrophic since the pot is bigger than our stack! With a stack to pot ratio (SPR) of less than 1 our hand has WAY too much equity to ever consider folding.

Also as strong as our hand is, with the size of the pot and stacks we don’t really want to slow play here. Giving hands like 76s or even 87s a chance to improve with so little money behind would be a crucial mistake. With the overall strength of our hand and the amount of chips in the pot the only real play is to move all-in.

Moving all-in is the best play.