DECISION POINT: You’re in a daily tournament with 24 players left and 10 get paid. The payout structure is top-heavy, with most of the money going to the top 3 spots, while 10th is only about twice the buy-in. Blinds are 1,000/2,000 with a 2,000 big blind ante. Action folds to the Hijack, a player with a 39BB stack who has been selective with their spots. The Hijack opens to 5,000 (2.5BBs) and action is on you in the Cutoff with K♥Q♦ and 12BBs. What do you do here?

PRO ANSWER: We are playing a daily tournament where 10 places get paid in a traditional top-heavy payout structure with most of the money going to the top 3 places and 10th getting a little less than twice the buy-in back. There are 24 players remaining, and the player in the Hijack has been utilizing their stack to be selectively active. The blinds are 1,000/2,000 with a 2,000 big blind ante.

We are dealt K♥Q♦ in the Cutoff and everyone folds to the Hijack who makes their standard raise of 5,000 (2.5BBs). With 12 big blinds remaining, we have what is often referred to as an “awkward” stack.

One of our best tools with an awkward stack is to find spots to move all-in over the top of a wide preflop raiser and use our entire stack as leverage to generate fold equity. Ideally, we also have some sort of hand to fall back on as well, although sometimes doing this as a play without regard for our cards has merit! The “sweet spot” for making this play is when our stack size is around 5-8x the preflop raiser’s raise amount. Within this reshoving sweet spot, there are important considerations. In scenarios where our reshove is as large as 8x, the reward we are getting for risking all our chips becomes less worth it. When our stack is less than 5x, the result is that we will start to get called more often and have less fold equity.

Since we are just a little below the 5x threshold, it is more important to have a hand that is likely to have good equity when called. The first step in determining whether our hand is of sufficient strength is to determine whether our opponent is likely to have hands in their range that we dominate. In this case, it is quite likely that the Hijack has hands including QJs/QTs/KJo/KJs/KTs/K9s in their opening range, unless we have opponent specific data that our opponent is playing much tighter than they should in this specific situation.

Just because our opponent has some hands in their range we dominate, that doesn’t mean we should always move all-in. However, considering we are likely to generate some fold equity by shoving and should have solid equity against their range when called, an all-in becomes a much more appealing option. With 24 players remaining and 10 getting paid, ICM is also a factor that could tip our decision.

In this scenario, the payout structure is more top-heavy and therefore our risk premium isn’t nearly high enough to consider passing on this spot without some sort of extreme opponent specific data.

Moving all-in is the best play.