[Cueball]

This occurred in a $20 NLHE event at stars, 480+ players and we are down to the last 29(well into the money). I have about 18k in chips(with blinds of 300/600) which places me in 7th or 8th spot and the chip leader for the tourney is sitting to my right. My table has a fair number of short stacks that are just trying to hang on for dear life and work their way up the payout ladder. I have been playing very tight but very aggressive when I do enter a hand.

Now for the situation, I am dealt Kd/Kh in my BB and the table folds around to the SB(the chip leader) who makes what appears to be a steal raise of just over 2 bets. At this point I pause for a sec to think about how to get him to put all his chips in and decide on a somewhat larger(but still small) re-raise hoping that he senses weakness and comes over the top of me...which he does almost instantly. The speed of his all-in forces me to think about the possibility that I'm a dog, but if he shows me aces, I can accept that beat. His cards appear, 22(can't recall the suits) and a deuce hits the turn to bust me out in 29th place.

Would anyone here play this hand any differently because my thoughts now were that I may have been able to pick on the short stacks for quite a while and could easily afford to sit and have the blinds run by quite a few times. The flipside of this is that I did have his hand dominated and stood the chance to put myself into cruise control to the top 5 or 6 which offered a much nicer payout than the $80 I got back for 29th. I see a bit of merit in both options, because I think the EV of stealing from the short stacks was pretty good, but a shot at doubling through against a big stack when I'm a big favorite was just too nice to pass up. Any suggestions or thoughts are welcome.