$80 live tournament, down to 8, only 5 pay. We have pocket 5s utg with 3k/6k blinds, 500 ante, and roughly 70k chips (near average). We open to 12k, MP calls, and hijack shoves for just over 18k, reopening action. MP probably has us covered, but it's close.

Do we call, knowing MP is calling any two cards at that price; raise to isolate and flip, hopefully folding out 66 to 99; or fold and wait for a better spot? Has to be raise, right? And then, what's the right price? All in, or just 36k or so?

With 12BB I'm either shoving or folding.

I'm never putting in 17% of my chips and then folding. I also don't want to play postflop with 30k in the middle and 60k behind with 55.

I agree with ad hoc's answer. There is no reason to just call with pretty much any hand, but 55 is a particuarly bad one to do so (what are you going to do against a shove in a flop like KJ9, or T98?)

Also, I wouldn't consider folding against such a small raise, so I think the only option here is to push! After all, what type of hands could the caller have in his range? Wouldn't he be 3-betting almost all of the higher pairs?

Finally, I am no MTT player myself, so I don't really know how to approach this spot but, can't we stay out of a lot of trouble by open-shoving our pocket fives?

ICM with no stack size of all opponents????

Go back and study ICM before you even think of it
Learn the basics then come back

It's difficult to give exact stacks for all opponents in a live tournament, I don't think you did a bad job of giving out information here.

Might depend on how top-heavy the prize structure is, but I'm guessing it's probably a fold with a small pair, 12bbs and being UTG.

ICM-wise, your small pairs are going to be bad when shoving UTG in ICM-heavy situations. Small pairs also do really badly as part of a raise/call or raise/fold range preflop. Hands which better fit into a raise/call range here are mainly big pairs; hands which fit into a raise/fold range probably include your Ax and decent Kx which are either borderline shoves or slightly losing (maybe hands like ATo, KJo, for example).

Obviously, your raise/calls and raise/folds are going to be dependent on the range and the stacksize you're having to call off, so it's hard to give a definitive answer here. If you're up against the 3bb stack then you're always calling your entire range, but some of the other stacks could be pretty tricky here. If unsure, I don't think you'll lose too much EV in this spot by only having a jam or fold strategy with this stacksize, that might be the way to go for now if you're going to get yourself into a lot of tricky spots like this.

Posting here is a good way to learn, so don't be put off by the guys that only have negative things to add when you've obviously taken the time out to post in the first place.

Good luck at the tables.

with 55 UTG 8 handed and 12bb, I would not open 2bb; shove or fold

depending on stack sizes, opponents,... I would rather fold