Playing in a tournament with blinds at 150/300 with no antes sitting right at 30 big blinds. I'm in MP1 at a 9 handed table and get dealt pocket queens. First two villains open limp. Normally, I would stick to my defaults and raise it to like 3x the BB plus a BB for each limper so that would be like $1,500; however, a few factors I considered, first, any raise of this size given my stack size would get me pot-committed very quickly but with 30 BB I felt like this was outside the re-shove zone so that did not seem like the most profitable play as all I would do is severely narrow any opponents hand range to only very premium hands and make a fold/call decision pretty easy and given my position, there were still a lot of opponents left to act. Second, on more than a few occasions this bet sizing had done nothing to thin the field in particular a couple of opponents at the table had flat called similar type of bets. Finally, and most important, the UTG player is a player I have some history with and he has a pretty good track record of shipping it with these type of situations which he had done several hands in a row just a few hands prior to first induce folds and then to finally double up to be at his current level of $12k in chips. So although he did not have a reshove stack size, shipping in this situation was well within his arsenal.
So, I decided to raise to $3k with the intention of signaling a dual impact that I'm pot-committed and willing to call off any shove over the top while at the same time making it seem a little bluffy to keep any opponent guessing with the end game of creating enough confusion to induce the UTG player to ship it in which case I'm glad to make a call as I'm likely well ahead of his range.
In the actual hand, everyone folded around to the UTG player who did shove and folded back to me and I snap called and doubled up against his pocket 2's.
So, I'm wondering if this type of deviation is the most profitable given both table and opponent specific info along with the fact I'm trying to balance the raise size to thin the field but not get myself pot-committed and not create a betting tell.
As always, look forward to your answer.