Was this a genuine "fold AA" spot?
So it's an online MTT with ~300 entrants. Top 10 get a ticket, nothing to play for after that. We're down to 11 players, I'm 5 handed with 0 short stacks. There are 3 short stacks on the other 6 handed table, which I'm watching obviously.
One player has ~3-4 BBs and two have < 1 BB. The player with the shortest stack has 0.3 BBs and is sitting to the left of the second shortest stack at 0.4 BBs.
The blinds move round so the 2nd shortest stack is now BB and obviously all-in. The short stack is UTG and uses his entire time bank. I'm thinking, "is he just time wasting here? Just fold and hope the forced all-in guy loses." He eventually calls and turns over AA.
Given he's the shortest stack, if he calls here with AA and doesn't beat everyone in the pot, he misses out on a ticket. They're going to be at least 3 ways too because the SB will be forced in (since UTG and BB have <0.5 BBs). I think mathematically it makes sense to call because AA vs 2 random hands is ~75% to win, whereas if he folds it'll be 50% for the BB to win/lose vs the SB.
However, this ignores the fact that all of the other stacks at the table should be limping here. Everyone is incentivised to call preflop just to increase the chance of knocking someone out, especially given having a bigger stack is useless after the next elimination, so the risk is near-zero. Winning with AA against 6 random hands is only ~25% likely. If they fold and everyone else calls, the BB only has a 20% chance to win (5 random hands).
Obviously we don't know if all the other players are smart enough to know to limp with any 2 cards in this spot though.
What would you do?