DECISION POINT: You are seven-handed in the later stages of a daily tournament where blinds are 1,500/3,000 with a 3,000 big blind ante. Action folds to the player in the MP2 seat, who you’ve observed as limping their weaker hands and raising their stronger ones, and they call. It folds to you in the Big Blind with 8♥8♦. What's your move?

PRO ANSWER: We are in the later stages of a daily tournament. The blinds are 1,500/3,000 with a 3,000 big blind ante. We have information that MP2 likes to split their ranges by both limping preflop and raising, and have seen enough showdowns to notice that they seem to be limping weaker hands and raising with stronger ones.

The action folds to MP2 who open limps and everyone else folds to us with 8♥8♦ in the Big Blind. These spots can be somewhat tricky as open limpers can come in many different types, particularly in the later stages of tournaments. During the early stages players often just limp to see a flop, but as stacks get shallower some opponents will also limp big hands as a trap to try and induce action from more aggressive players at the table.

In this instance, we have a read that MP2 likes to raise strong hands and limp weaker ones, which is an important factor that could tip our decision. We also have a fairly strong hand that figures to be well ahead of their limping range. In addition we are being offered tremendous risk/reward as there are over 10,000 chips in the middle and we have 36,000 chips behind.

Any time we can potentially add over 25% to our stack preflop there is a pretty compelling case to start moving all-in with a wide variety of hands both for value and as a semi-bluff. Pocket eights is a great candidate because we are likely ahead and will often have significant equity against MP2’s range the times that we are called.

It may be tempting to make a non all-in raise to try and induce some action from our opponent. In this scenario our specific hand prefers to try and force out hands that may continue to a non all-in raise to fold, such as JTs/T9s/A9o that have significant equity against us but would likely fold to an all-in. We could exploitatively raise non all-in with some of our strongest holdings, but with pocket eights we prefer to maximize fold equity.

If we had a read that our opponent liked to trap frequently when limping preflop, then checking our option in the Big Blind could also be a compelling play. However, in this instance given our previous experience with MP2 in the tournament it is much more likely that this limp indicates a weak range, so moving all-in is best.

Moving all-in is the best play.