Tourney question:

[Baulucky]

85 left at an NL freeroll, 45 spots pay, I'm 41st with an avg. stack of 15K, people going allin with weak hands.

Folded to me in MP, I raise 5K with JJ, blinds at 600-1200, loose LP player raises allin, he has me covered, all fold and it's to me. I call. He shows AQo and draws an A to bust me.

Point my mistakes please.

[kdog]

I'm by no means a NL expert but I'm interested in what others think of my reply so here goes...

Holding JJ at this stage of the tourney the last thing I want is action on the hand. The raise to $5000 allows, even invites the AQ to try to move you off the hand with an all in raise. It also pretty much ensures that if you are called
the best you can hope for is a coin flip with the caller holding overcards.

You are not in survival mode yet but you do need to acquire more chips and the blinds add more than 10% to your stack. I think your two options here are push or call only, hoping for an unraised flop and allowing you to get away from the hand if significant action develops behind you.

[thomastem]

All-in is viable with the blinds so hi but I would go with a 3x bet of $3600.

Why? Because $3600 is as likely to take the blinds as 5K and I can get away from all-in easier. Keeping chips is +EV because of the fact that you've noticed loose all-ins and people getting knocked out.

[fnurt]

I would play it like you did 110% of the time.

Let's flip the story around and assume you held AK while the LP player had 88. I guarantee if you had lost there would be posts saying "you should have folded, because the best you could have had was a coinflip."

The fact is that in online play the LP player is about 10x more likely to make this play with a low-medium pair than with AQ. It happens that you were unlikely to "only" be a small favorite this time, but you will see 44-TT so many times in this situation (we're talking a fishy freeroll) that it has to be hugely +EV to call.