DECISION POINT: You are approaching the late stage of a daily tournament with blinds at 1,000/2,000 and a 2,000 big blind ante. Most of the stacks at the table are between 30-50BBs except for you and the UTG+1 player who both have 17BBs. The UTG+1 player raises to 6,000 (3BBs) and it folds to you in the Big Blind with 7♠7♣.

Action is on you, what do you do here?

PRO ANSWER: We are approaching the late stage of a daily tournament with blinds at 1,000/2,000 and a 2,000 big blind ante. The table is filled with mostly stacks between 30-50 big blinds. We are dealt 7s7c in the Big Blind. UTG+1 raises to 6,000 and everyone folds to us.

The first step to get a baseline for analysis of the hand after the fact is to run the specific parameters through a Game Theory Optimal (GTO) solver to see what we should do according to GTO strategy. In this specific situation, UTG+1 is supposed to be opening first-in with close to 12% of all hands, including combos such as QJ and A7s. Against that specific range of opening hands the solver indicates you can profitably shove all-in with a pair as small as pocket fives.

If we dig deeper in the solver output, the EV difference between calling and re-shoving our pocket sevens is very small, down to a hundredth of a big blind separating the EV of the two decisions. The potential issue with just calling however, is that middle pocket pairs can be extremely difficult to play appropriately out of position.

The Expected Value of each action calculated by the Solver assumes perfect actions for each opponent in the hand, therefore it assumes that we will play perfectly postflop. That assumption means that we are not always folding when the flop is K-J-4 and our opponent continuation bets, which can be very tough to do in real-time.

Therefore even though the EVs of calling versus moving all-in are quite close, in reality we are much less likely to fully realize that equity with our sevens postflop against opponents who have some level of skill.

Another item to factor when interpreting the results is that while the solver’s default range for the UTG+1 player includes opening nearly 12% of hands, many opponents in small to mid stakes games are not correctly raising first-in with this wide of a hand range. Sometimes, they are also splitting their range between limping and raising with specific combos in the range at a certain frequency.

In this case we are assuming the more realistic representation of UTG+1 opening strategy and so it is likely the range will be quite a bit stronger than the solver suggests. If we are able to confirm through shown hands that our opponent is playing less of a GTO range and more of a real world range first-in, we can adjust by folding our sevens at this stack depth to the tighter players.

Since the setup for this hand assumes no specific player knowledge or awareness of population tendencies, we will by default, assume that our opponents play well until proven otherwise. Against competent opposition, moving all-in here is the most profitable play.

Moving all-in is the best play.