Preflop is good. I think we have to call the flop, raising would be a disaster and I don’t like folding to a 1/2 pot bet and 7bb shove (especially because the initial bettor can’t 3bet). Top pair second kicker isn’t especially strong multi-way but still good enough to take a turn.

On the turn, we can assume that villain is rarely (if ever) bluffing into a dry side pot, so we have to decide how we fare against their value range. What hands do you expect villain to shove for value?

This is a hard spot to analyze because weaker players may call a fairly wide range HJ vs EP at 23bb, but stronger players will likely have extremely narrow ranges in this situation.

The hands I would most expect hijack flatting range to contain are AA,KK,AQs,AJs,KQs,KJs, and maybe QJs. A few more combos we could consider are TT,99,88,ATs,KTs,QTs, JTs, and AQo. Personally, I think TT should be 3betting and 88 should be folding (99 probably runs close in value between small 3bet, shove, call, and fold). AQo is a difficult one because it benefits a lot from isolating the original raiser but is doing poorly against a decent EP GII range (30.6 – 38.2% equity). IMO, the rest of those hands are pretty bad (ATs is probably fine). Other hands weaker villains might add to those ranges are 77-55 (44+ is fine on the button but terrible in the hijack), AJo, KQo and aces like A9s and A5s.

When the villain bets a 4-way flop, I think we can narrow that range considerably. AA,KK,TT,AQs,KQs,KJs and AQo are the only hands I realistically expect to see very often. QJs may be there but it’s really doing poorly when anyone chooses to continue. Even if we include the 2 combos of QJs, our equity vs range (even with the strong blocker effects of our hand) is only 26%. I still think calling the flop is our best move but it’s actually really close and I wouldn’t hate folding vs. a strong player. They should be very careful in a large 4-way pot when any further betting is going to be for their entire stack.

Even if we eliminate the slowplayed overpairs and AQo (the majority of the combos that beat us), we’re still only looking at 41% equity vs a betting range of AQs,KQs,KJs,QJs,TT. This is all without considering the range of the all-in shortstack. I’m not going to bother narrowing that and making calculations, but it’s worth considering that we’re by no means guaranteed the entire pot even when we beat the initial bettor. This should make us more inclined to fold to turn bets than we would be in a heads up pot.

On the blank turn vs. the most optimistic villain range (all of the flop combos and no AA/KK/AQo) we now have 43.8% equity. However, if we eliminate the KJs/QJs hands which villain is least likely to be shoving (especially since they can take a free river), our equity plummets to 10.6%. It only gets worse if we add slowplays and AQo to their preflop range (8.9%). All that to say that I think this is a mandatory fold on the turn. I think we’re better off folding the flop if we’re not folding turns to further betting.

AQ would be fine to call turn (although likely close) because we now chop with many combos, beat villain’s KQs, and block the most likely preflop slowplays (AA is more likely to slowplay than KK). AxQd has 57% equity vs. the optimistic range and still retains 28.4% equity against the strongest range I looked at (all the AA/KK, no KJs/QJs).