DECISION POINT: You are in a 39 player local daily tournament with 5 players left and 4 places getting paid (40% of the prize pool goes to first). Blinds are 10K/25K with a 25K ante and you are the big stack with 450K. Action folds to you on the Button with A♦9♦, what do you do?

PRO ANSWER: We are playing in a small daily tournament with 39 entrants that pays 4 places with a payout structure of 40% of the prize pool to first, 30% to second, 20% to third, and 10% to fourth. There are 5 players left and we are the big stack with 450K chips at 10,000/25,000 blinds with a 25K big blind ante. We are dealt Ad9d on the Button and the Hijack and Cutoff fold to us.

On the exact bubble of a daily tournament like this the ICM pressure is huge. It would be a catastrophic mistake If the Big Blind ever busts before the Small Blind (who has ~3 big blinds left).

Many players are tempted to make a small raise here, since moving all-in and losing to the Big Blind would move us down to one of the shorter stacks. As counterintuitive as it might seem, making a small raise here is actually a higher variance play because it is correct strategy for the Big Blind to call a small raise with a wide variety of hands due to the overwhelming pot odds they are getting.

To demonstrate how powerful ICM pressure is here, running this in a simulation shows that the Button should shove 91.7% of hands here. Even if the Big Blind knows exactly that we are shoving here with nearly our entire range they are only supposed to call with a range of TT+, or as few as 2.3% of hands.

Looking a little deeper at the simulation, If we were to make a minimum raise to 50K the Big Blind is supposed to call with 58.1% of hands in a spot where if they connect with the flop they likely have to continue. The overwhelming ICM pressure makes shoving here with a wide variety of hands a massively profitable play.

If we happen to know the Big Blind’s game well and have observed that they would still fold a vast majority of their hands to a smaller raise, then we could make an exploitative adjustment and raise smaller preflop. However, without that player-specific knowledge this is an easy all-in and a massively profitable spot as the chip leader!

Moving all-in is the best play.