DECISION POINT: You’re playing a $300 daily local tournament with blinds currently at 250/500 and a 500 big blind ante. Play at your table has been passive and a bit tight. The tournament has been running for about 2 hours so far, and the average stack is approaching 50BBs. The UTG+1 player, who you’ve observed using GTO-style opening ranges, raises to 1,100. It folds to the Button who calls and action is on you in the Small Blind with 8♠8♣. What do you do here?

PRO ANSWER: We are playing a local daily tournament with a $300 buy-in. We’ve been playing just a little over two hours, and the play has been mostly passive, with people playing a bit tighter as the average stack has started to approach 50 big blinds. The player in the UTG+1 seat seems to use solid, GTO-style opening ranges. The blinds are 250/500 with a 500 big blind ante.

We are dealt 8♠8♣ in the Small Blind. The UTG player folds and UTG+1 makes it 1,100 chips. Everyone folds to the Button who flat calls, and action is on us. One of the biggest mistakes players make is calling far too often out of the Small Blind. Since we’re always out of position postflop and still have the Big Blind to act behind us preflop, we are at a huge disadvantage when entering the pot passively.

Given these factors, our hand must be able to meet some clear requirements in order to call profitably in this scenario, or else we are much better off just folding or raising.

When choosing to call a raise in this spot we must have a hand that plays well multiway. With two opponents already in the pot and the potential for a third behind us to join that will be getting a great price to continue, so we will often be seeing flops 3-4 ways when we call. This means offsuit unpaired combinations are out of the question. In fact, if we consult GTO preflop charts for this situation, KQo is the only offsuit unpaired hand that mixes calling and raising, while every other offsuit unpaired hand either folds or raises.

We also want to avoid playing too many hands that get easily dominated by multiple opponents. Many players call with hands like 96s in this situation as they have some potential to flop a big hand, however these hands hit far less often than players may think. Additionally, these hands are also often easily dominated by many of the hands in our opponents’ ranges.

So, what kinds of hands should we call with? The best candidates will typically be hands that have a lot of hard equity. These hands include pocket pairs that aren’t big enough to re-raise with, suited Ax hands, suited broadway hands, and a few direct suited connectors.

Pocket eights fall firmly into that mix as it is a fairly strong pocket pair, but not so strong that it warrants a 3-bet against an early position open and Button flat.

Calling is the best play.