[apryllshowers]

At stars you are probably already in the money with very little incentive to ladder move because you will not see a jump in prize money until you hit the final table, and you will not see a significant jump until you hit the top 5. You have an average stack with 2 aggressive players on your left with bigger stacks. Given this dynamic you need some chips to simply survive to the final table. Survival sucks, so how will you get some chips? Generally one of three ways: (i) you find a big hand and it gets paid off [this never never happens to me so don't hold your breath]; (ii) you win more than your share of the preflop dead money via uncalled open raises; or (iii)you make some resteal allin reraises preflop (I hesitate to leave out the preferred pokerstars method of getting your money in with a dominated hand and sucking out, but I will chance it).

Your given scenario calls for an open raise. How much? Any raise will look like a steal, especially from an aggressive player like yourself. With two aggressive players yet to act with bigger stacks a resteal is very likely. If you raise to 24000 you are virtually committed to calling the allin reraise. If you raise to 18000 you can *maybe* lay it down to a reraise, but who the hell wants to do that at this crucial stage. I think the correct play is to move allin. In fact, you can probably do that in this spot with any two cards and win the 10K+ dead money the vast majority of the time. Having 55 gives you a little better shot at winning a showdown if called, but the true strength of your allin raise is the likelihood your opponents will fold preflop. Your 75K stack can hurt the 2 big stacks and can bust the short stack. All 3 of them will need to find a pretty big hand to call. When they fold you have increased your stack by more than 10%. An allin move may get them to fold hands as strong as 99 and AQ. You are only likely to be called by AA KK QQ JJ AK and TT.

Move allin.