Villain in this hand is extremely loose and passive pre-flop. They've open limped and flatted raises many times and seem to be playing most hands. I don't recall them having raised or 3betted prior to this hand.
They've ran their starting stack of 20k down to roughly 10k by paying off with a few second best hands.

Still in the early stages of the tournament

Hero is in CO with a 21k stack
blinds are 100/200 with a 200 ante.

2 limpers
Hero in CO makes it 1300 with K Q
Villain in BTN 3bets to 3k
Everyone else folds
Hero Calls


Flop: (6.9k BB, 2 players) J 9 3
Hero checks, Villain shoves their remaining 7k


Is this a call?

If they're loose-passive generally and then take this line, you're toast.

What are we hoping villain has if we make the call?
Seems like a minimal chance he has tens, we’re all but dead if he has JJ/QQ/KK or even AK/AQ/AJ.
Realistically we only have a gutshot to give us the winning hand at the river.
What equity do you see here?

You do have equity, 19% against AA and 36% against AJ. It is kind of close, but probably a fold.

Preflop, I would just fold to the 3! from a loose/passive player which leave a psb behind. I know this is in general a hand to call a 3! with.

I'd be shocked if he showed up as light as AJ here. I think your best-case scenario is QQ.

I also don't think you need to raise this large preflop. 6.5x after two limpers is pretty high. 4.5x is fine, although you could go a little larger given the stack depths here.

Thanks for the feedback

Yes this player was super loose passive but I should probably have mentioned that since this was the early stages my sample on him was relatively small - probably only 15-20 hands

@Nath Fair point on the raise size. I had been observing the table dynamics and 3-4x raises after limpers were resulting in all the limpers calling. I wanted to ideally get the pot heads up and I had it in my head to raise it to 1100 but when I reached down for chips I had 3 x 100 chips and just ended up putting them all in

So yeah I folded this in game and villain showed AJs


I have a follow up theoretical question: Let's say that I knew villain's hand here when he shoved. I believe the pot odds require 33.5% equity and my hand has near 37%.
Is a marginally +Chip EV spot like that worth calling off when the downside is that if you lose you end up relatively short stacked?
If it is then how about instead the same scenario but our starting stack was the same as villains (10k) so that this would eliminate us if we call and lose?

With slightly +EV spots where I cover by a lot, I will pass up slightly +EV spots like this to maintain a big stack. Besides, in live low stakes tournaments the field is generally quite bad so you can find much better spots than this. (Not sure if this is the theoretically correct answer.)

If you have the same stack as him it is definitely a fold due to ICM.

A 3.5% edge is probably bigger than the ICM adjustment at this point. Not by much, I think in the early stages with ICM you need about a 2-2.5% equity premium to call off.