obviously there are times when u can fold QQ sometimes because it's only the 3rd best hand preflop
I completely disagree. You should NOT fold poket Queens pre-flop BECAUSE it's the 3rd best hand in poker.
Of course you can be beaten by a better hand but that's a risk you have to take. QQ is a very good hand and a very good opportunity, so it is foolish in my opinion to pass it simply because it can be beaten.
Of course you can do anything you want in poker, you can fold your BB with 5-1
odds, lay down big PPs but if you miss these opportunities, you do not give yourself the maximum chance to win.
Don't fold QQ pre flop, take a chance with it and if you lose, there's always another tournament.
There is one notable exception though where you should fold. If you are playing a satellite and you know you have enough chips so you can fold every hand and guaranty a seat, you should ALWAYS fold QQ there and the same applies to KK and AA. You should not even contemplate a call.
There are also more arguable circumstances:
You also may want to fold QQ preflop if you are at the bubble and cashing is very important to you. If I was a the
wsop one spot before the money (or the final table), I would forgo the opportunity to in order to achieve such a major cash. In other words the certainty of a payout would outweight the benefit that a winning showdown would give me for the rest of my tournament. This is my view in the light of my personal circumstances but that is obviously up to the player to decide, there's no way to say whether this is good or bad play because people's circumstances are different. It would be bad play for Phil Ivey to do so, understandable for me.
Someone is 3betting you. People typically do that with AA or KK, sometimes AK or QQ. They put a minimal re-raise to increase the size of the pot, we've all seen this happen, it's pretty standard play. But again folding is debatable because if the re-raise is minimal, you may want to just call the additional chips and see a flop. But if you are almost sure the guy has AA or KK, the fold certainly makes sense.
You may also want to fold if there are too many people all in preflop. This is debatable again but if 4 people are all in already, you have an increased likelihood that one for these guys (especially the 4th caller has a monster) and you also have a relatively low chance of winning, even if you're the favourite since there are many people in the hand. Even if it makes sense to call from a odds point of view, survival is also a very important aspect of freezeout tournament poker. So it MAY be the right thing to do here.
Perhaps if you were playing a tournament that is expensive relative to your
bankroll (say the
poker stars Sunday Million), you may want to pass here and look for other oppotunities later rather than betting your future tournament life on that one hand, that early. It would certainly ring alarm bells if someone would push like that in a tournament with experienced players.
But seriously these are very rare situations and in virtually any situation you should NOT fold such a nice hand here.