I think adopting a limping range is fine here if both stacks are shorter, but it loses a lot of value when you’re as deep as 85bb effective versus the BB. I would only do it in spots where I was comfortable removing a raising range altogether because I knew I could still get stacks in with the top of my range, but when 85bb effective it’s going to be really tough for you to limp AA, get raised to 4bb, 3-bet to 11bb, get 4-bet to 26bb and then get called wide-ish when you 5-bet jam.

I think just making it 2.5bb here with an Ace blocker is fine. If the BB is 3-betting too much, just punish them with 4-bets – you’ll make more chips by continuing to open wide and expanding your 4-bet range than you will by tightening up your opens to the point of sacrificing +EV spots.

Good analysis, DIDD. I think the answer to your question is contained in your original post – you mention that you want to make it 2.7bb vs the 85bb stack, but 2.2bb versus the shorter one. Why not just make it 2.5bb and split the difference? Seems easiest. 🙂

Worth noting here that while the SB is basically forced to have a merged 3-betting range here since they’re pretty much push-folding, the BB is likely to be more polarized. So I might choose to attack the BB by doing more flatting rather than immediately diverting towards 4-betting a ton – the BB’s 3-bet bluffs are likely to be fairly weak hands, and thus forcing them to play postflop with those hands might engineer some mistakes on their part.

KableTownCEO said
I have a question on exploitative play. Is this an opportunity to tighten our opening range, while we maintain a perceived opening range including this AXo, in order to make more money vs them postflop when we have fewer hands that are difficult to connect? It seems like theginger45 is saying no we should still open this and just raise/fold.   

It’s a good question, but it’s much more relevant in cash games when postflop play is going to happen on a much more frequent basis, and where stacks are much deeper. Here, only one of the two players behind you is even going to have a flatting range, and if you do get flatted, you’re less than 85bb deep, which means the impact of any potential misread of your range by villain is going to be less effective than if we were playing 100+ effective. We’re close to the point of having to worry more about postflop play, but we’re not quite there yet.

Generally in tournaments your most bread-and-butter source of EV is capitalizing on preflop pots, i.e. taking pots down without showdown versus villains who aren’t defending their blinds or button enough. In most instances our desire to capitalize preflop takes priority over constructing a range that plays well post, but it’s good to have postflop play in mind, because we don’t want to go too far overboard preflop, and there’s usually some chance of getting flatted. Here, it might be enough to drop K4o out of our opening range, but A4o is still too strong.