Q♦Q♣ vs a Preflop All-In, what do you do here?
DECISION POINT: In a Tournament where blinds are 1,000/2,000 you raise from Under the Gun to 7,500 with Q♦Q♣. A Middle Position player calls and it folds to the Small Blind who shoves all-in. The Big Blind folds and action is on you, what do you do here?
PRO ANSWER: We raise to 7,500 UTG with pocket queens and are called by MP2. Then the Small Blind over shoves for 65K. It is folded back to us and we have a decision to make. With these stack sizes most likely our preflop raise should have been a bit smaller. Often times as effective stacks get under 40BBs a raise as small as 2.5BBs is still able to thin the field, and we chose a size of nearly 4BBs.
Putting the Small Blind on a range here can be a little tough. It is unlikely they are stealing considering we raised from UTG and already have one caller. Assuming the SB put us on a reasonably narrow range of something like 88+/AJ+/KQ, their shoving range for value should probably look something like TT+/AK/AQs.
Against that range we have almost 53% equity with a significant amount of dead money in the pot. It’s also quite possible they would make a smaller, non all-in raise with hands like AA/KK which would increase our equity significantly.
Continued below…
We would need some sort of extraordinary read that our opponent can only have QQ+/AK here and even in that worst case scenario, we have over 40% equity. We need almost exactly 40% equity to make calling here break even once we factor in the dead money already in the pot.
Our worst case scenario is basically break even in this situation, and best case we are ahead with a lot of dead money in the pot. This is a situation where even though playing such a huge pot “feels” bad, it is a huge opportunity for us that’s just too good to pass on.
Calling is the best play.
How would you play it?
Share your answer in the comments below!
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