DECISION POINT: You are in the middle stages of an online tournament with blinds at 500/1,000 and a 1,000 big blind ante. The table stacks vary from 20-50BBs and you have 14BBs after losing a few significant pots. Action folds to you in the Cutoff with pocket sixes.

What do you do here?

PRO ANSWER: We are playing an online tournament. We’ve lost a few significant pots in the middle stages of the tournament and are down to 14,000 chips at 500/1,000 blinds with a 1,000 big blind ante. Most of the stacks at the table are in the 20-50BBs range. We are dealt black sixes in the Cutoff and action folds to us.

Our hand is quite strong given the situation. A pocket pair in late position is normally a part of our first-in hand range. A temptation many players have at this point in the tournament is to either limp or make a small raise. Often the justification provided for this play is that they are attempting to reduce the variance or avoid swings in their chip stack.

What players don’t realize is that if they are against good, aggressive opponents, limping or raising small actually achieves the opposite.

This strategy often encourages aggressive opponents to reshove over the top of their limp or raise with hands as wide as J9s that would likely fold to an all-in play but have 50% equity against sixes when all-in preflop.

If we were against very passive opponents that aren’t likely to reraise lightly, making a very small raise could be an option. However, against any sort of reasonably aggressive opposition you are actually reducing overall variance by moving all-in and getting folds from hands in your opponents range with good equity against you that may otherwise continue vs a smaller raise size or limp.

In fact, if we use a solver to analyze competent range for opponents in the Cutoff, Button, Small Blind, and Big Blind, we find that pocket 9s is the lowest pocket pair where it becomes positive expected value to make a small raise with first-in from late position at these stack sizes. All lower pairs avoid inducing action through betting and would prefer to take the pot down preflop using all-in sizing.

When called, these lower pairs will have reasonable equity versus our opponents’ ranges.

Moving all-in preflop is the best play.