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You are a few hours into a multi table tournament. Your stack is 26k and blinds are 300/600 with a 75 chip ante. You find yourself in the small blind with 8 7. The action is folded to the cutoff, a thinking regular with 25k, who open-raises to 1,500. The button folds and action is on you in the small blind. Although there is nothing wrong with folding here, you decide to call and the big blind folds. The flop comes down A 9 2. How should you proceed?

Before we discuss possible options for playing the hand, we should try to put the villain on a potential range of hands. Let’s say that his range includes all pocket pairs, probably all suited aces, unsuited aces 8 and up, and all broadway cards. For those of you who use Pokerstove, we are defining his range as: 22+, A2s+, KTs+, QTs+, JTs, A8o+, KTo+, QT. We can safely assume that our opponent will be continuation betting 85% of the time here. I would expect that a smart thinking player would sometimes check behind with high pocket pairs with lots of showdown value.

Given that we expect the villain to continuation bet roughly 85% of the time, what is the optimal way to play our hand? Of course if we knew what hand villain had, playing our 8 7 would be easy. When he has random broadway cards like KQ KJ QJ we would check raise for maximum value. When he has strong aces and sets we would check call to draw to our flush for the cheapest possible price. But because poker is a game of limited information, and we don’t know what villain has, we have to decide how to play the hand optimally against villain’s RANGE of hands.

One option is to lead out on the flop. The reason I don’t like this option is simple: villain knows that we know that he is continuation betting most of the time. Therefore, this would almost never be our line with a super strong hand like a set. We can expect a thinking opponent to raise us for value with most of his aces and flat with pocket pairs. When villain has broadway cards he might float us or re-raise as a bluff since he knows we aren’t leading out with a very strong hand that often. This line is bad against a smart thinking player then because (a) our semi-bluff is almost never generating a fold, and (b) sometimes villain will re-raise us and we are put in a tough spot where we are either pushed off our draw or forced to 4-bet shove (if we are called we are at best a 3:1 dog and we can’t expect to have much fold equity after villain 3-bets).

Another option is to check-raise. This line will work well against some of the hands in villains range, including small to mid pocket pairs and his random broadway hands. We can expect villain to fold hands like these and we will win a big pot. The problem, though, is that we are going to get 4-bet shoved on a fair amount of the time. Villain’s hand range which we defined earlier contains a ton of random aces. Three of the weak aces have made two pairs (A9s,A9o,A2s) and we can’t expect to generate folds from hands like AJ AQ and AK. Therefore we can expect villain to 4-bet shove with a fair amount of his range, at which point we will be priced in and forced to put our tournament on the line as a 3:1 dog.

There is a third option here, and I think it’s the best: Check-call the continuation bet on the flop and lead on non-spade turns. This line allows us to lose the least against strong hands like two pairs and strong aces while still pushing out broadway cards and low to mid pocket pairs. It also sets us up perfectly for a shove on the river if we get flatted on the turn and then successfully draw to the flush. Let’s say, for example, that villain has KQo. He will continuation-bet the flop, and since we are check-calling, our line looks like it could be a strong hand. Our lead on the turn will be much more believable than a lead on the flop, as it looks like we could be protecting a made hand from the flush draw. Furthermore, because the pot will be bigger at that point, a re-raise bluff from the villain will force him to commit his whole stack.

One of the most interesting aspects of the line I am proposing is that it allows us the potential to draw to all five cards at a price that we are defining. If we lead the turn for half the pot, a good thinking regular probably isn’t 4-bet shoving a non-two-pair ace like A3s.  If you don’t have a stomach for math you can stop reading here. The pot on the flop is 4,350 (750 antes + 1,500 pre-flop raiser + 1,500 our call + 600 folded big blind). We have 24,500 chips and villain has 23,500. We can expect his continuation bet to be around 2500. This means the pot is now 9,350 - our stack is 22k and villain’s stack is 21k.

Note here that if we had check-raised the flop, it would have cost us at least 7k and if villain 4-bet-shoves it will cost us our last 17k which is another 12 big blinds. If the turn blanks, we can lead for half the pot with a bet of around 4,600. At this point, the villain probably WON’T re-raise us for value anymore with every ace (maybe only two pairs and AQ-AK) and we can expect to generate folds from random broadway hands. Hands like ATo and ATs, which would have 4-bet shoved us on the flop, now usually just call and allow us to draw to a river card AT OUR PRICE. If villain calls, the pot will be ~18k and we will be left with ~18k ourselves. If we make our flush on the river we can shove for a pot-sized bet and if we miss we can check-fold and leave ourselves with 30 big blinds.

dmschec

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