$50 tourney. 60 entrants. Five people left. Four pay.


Blinds are 1000/2000, and I have 17500.

In the last 10 or 12 hands I've raised all-in four times with Ax, pairs, two broadway....slowed down a bit when my stack got large enough...now the blinds have gone up again and I'm under 10x BB again. I have the 2nd smallest stack. I'm easily best player at the table.


I'm in the big blind, everyone folds, the SB limps.


The SB sucks. She limps about 90% of her hands...never raises preflop. Calling station with top/middle pair, will chase gutters, and if she bets it's always the minimum, unless she has the stone cold nuts.

She has called preflop all-ins with Q2, Q6, K3 and a few other similar hands.


She has about 25k in chips.


The first card I see is an ace.


Is that good enough to go all-in?

With weaker aces do I look for a check, and look for a good flop and hope she has something to call with? Or do I take my likely 60/40 proposition preflop? With AA, I'm pushing...she calls with too many hands to worry about trapping her postflop. But do I scale down my pushing range for the same reasons?

If I double up here I'm gonna have to get really unlucky to not win the tourney.

How short is the shortest stack? If he's fairly close to you in stack size, I'm shoving a lot here. If he's < 10k I'm checking behind quite a lot. I'm checking behind a lot more suited aces since they hit harder and safer than non suited..

Your statement about doubling up making you a heavy favourite to win leads me more towards shoving any ace...depends on how many chips are in play though.

Small stack has about 12k. There are about 160k chips in play. The two leaders have about 50k. And one of them is worse than the SB in this hand.

with that info I lean more toward shoving any ace regardless and taking a 60:40 for a good shot at winning. How often do you think you are getting called by the SB?

I'd be pretty interested to see what ICM says here given the small field and small number of payouts. Is A2o+ really a +$ev shove? I can't think it being good or bad - probably fairly break even.
Given you think you have a huge edge on the field, ICM isn't going to be entirely accurate though.

I think its a shove, but I usually play for the win in almost every tourny I play

SB will likely call with a LOT of hands.


Any pair...any ace.. any king, queen and maybe even jack.

Maybe any two suited.

T9 wouldn't surprise me either.

Shooooooooooooooooooooove