DECISION POINT: You are at a six handed table in the middle stages of a tournament with blinds at 1,000/2,000. The UTG player, Hijack, and the Button all limp into the pot. The Small Blind completes and action is on you in the Big Blind with T♠T♥. What do you do here?

PRO ANSWER: We are playing in the middle stages of a tournament six handed. The blinds are 1,000/2,000 and there has been no ante introduced yet. We are dealt T♠T♥ in the Big Blind. The UTG player limps along with Hijack and the Button. The Small Blind completes and action is on us.

We have 44,000 chips behind in our stack with 10,000 chips in the pot and a premium hand in pocket tens. Any time we can add chips that would increase our stack 20-25% it is a spot where we should very seriously consider making a move regardless of the strength of our hand. In this case our preflop hand strength is well above average.

A standard raise in this spot would be in the 12,000-14,000 chip range, which is getting dangerously close to one third of our stack. Once we start to commit close to one third of our stack preflop we approach a pot commitment threshold where folding on future street would be a big mistake due to the pot odds we will be getting

When a standard preflop raise size represents one-third of our stack it can often become correct just to move all-in, especially in tournaments where there is additional value to keeping variance down and slowly increasing your stack without showdowns.

While there is some merit to just making a smaller raise here, it’s very tough to have a balanced range in this spot. Hands like AK/AQ are really going to want to move all-in. The fact that we are approaching the commitment threshold with any standard raise, coupled with the strength of our hand and the amount of chips already in the pot, makes this a great spot for us to move all-in.

We are likely well ahead of our opponent’s ranges so we’re usually in okay shape even if we are called, and if not we’ll have increased our stack by 10,000 chips uncontested.

Moving all-in is the best play.

It’s that fundamental question that, as poker players, we all ask ourselves on a regular basis…

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