DECISION POINT: You are in a daily tournament with blinds at 1,000/2,000 and a 2,000 big blind ante. Half of the field is still in play and you are the short stack at your table with 32,000 (16BBs). From Middle position you open raise to 4,000 with 6♦6♣, the Cutoff calls, the Button moves all-in for 46,000, and both Blinds fold.

Action is back on you, what do you do?

PRO ANSWER: We are in the middle stages of a daily tournament with around 50% of the field remaining and the blinds are 1,000/2,000 with a 2,000 big blind ante. We start the hand with 32,000 chips (16BBs). The rest of the table has us covered with stacks in the 20-30 big blind range. We are dealt 6d6c in middle position and action folds to us.

With this stack size both making a small opening raise and moving all-in are good plays. One way to help us decide which we should do is to ask ourselves how likely someone behind us is to reraise all-in with a wide range. With opponents behind that are more likely to reshove against a normal sized open we should favor moving all-in, as we would prefer to fold out hands such as A7s/JTs that have good equity against us and would likely fold to an all-in.

We elect to make a small raise to 4,000. Action folds to the Cutoff who flat calls, the Button moves all-in for 46,000, and we now have a decision for our tournament life.

There is a fair amount of potential dead money in the pot and we do have a hand that plays well all-in. That being said, as a starting point in real-time we can ask ourselves at the table “does our opponent move all-in with any hands we dominate?”.

If we think the Button is capable of making this big squeeze shove all-in with hands as wide as A6s/55, then there would be a more compelling reason to call. If our opponent’s reshoving range is more narrow, then it becomes increasingly likely we should fold. There are other compelling factors that may weigh into our decision such as ICM and the Cutoff’s specific range, however this is an excellent starting point.

In this instance, it is unlikely that our opponent has many hands in their range that we dominate. If we thought the Button was the type of player who could reshove 25BBs with a range of hands including 22-55/A2s-A6s, we likely should have just moved all-in preflop first-in to the pot. Taking a closer look at this spot in a solver we see the threshold to call this reshove is pocket sevens, and that assumes we are facing a GTO opponent using 66 and A6s as the bottom of their 3-bet squeezing range.

Folding is the best play.