DECISION POINT: You are in a large field WSOP bracelet event with blinds at 1,000/1,500 with a 1,500 big blind ante. A very loose UTG player who has been opening 50% of hands (showing down hands such as offsuit connectors and Ax from all positions) min-raises to 3,000. The UTG+1 player 3-bets to 4,500 and you 4-bet to 15,000 from MP2 with J♥J♦. The Button calls, the original raiser folds, the UTG+1 player makes it 65,000, and action is on you.

What do you do here?

PRO ANSWER: We are in a large field WSOP event shortly after the dinner break. The blinds are 1,000/1,500 with a 1,500 big blind ante. The UTG player has been playing wildly, opening and 3-betting an estimated 50% of hands, showing down hands such as offsuit connectors and Ax hands from all positions. We are dealt JhJd in MP2 and the loose, wild UTG player makes a minimum raise to 3,000. The UTG+1 player then 3-bets to 4,500 and it folds to us.

Under normal circumstances an UTG raise and an UTG+1 reraise would make us think twice about playing our jacks. Given the tendencies of the UTG player though it is quite likely that the UTG+1 player would make a small isolation raise with a much wider range than normal in an attempt to isolate the UTG player’s wide range and play heads up in position.

With so many players left to act it’s unlikely they are isolating with a super loose range, but they could easily be isolating with the top 15% or so of hands and our jacks are well ahead of that range. We 4-bet to 15,000 and action folds to the Button who just flat calls our raise. Everyone else (including the wild UTG player) folds and then the UTG+1 player 5-bets to 65,000!

While UTG+1 might isolate the UTG player with a wide range, to 5-bet after we 4-bet and the Button cold call is likely a VERY narrow range, something like QQ+/AK. If we knew that the Button would fold 100% of the time we would have around 36% equity against the UTG range.

The raise is effectively all-in because if we elect to continue in the hand neither player should ever fold a future street, barring extreme circumstances like exposed cards. If we evaluate this as an all-in situation then we’d be calling 73,500 to win 125,500, which is a little worse than 2:1 odds.

If we knew the Button would fold 100% of the time this decision would be incredibly close assuming the assessment of our opponent’s ranges are accurate. However, given we can’t be certain the Button will fold, we have to consider a possible slowplay with a big hand that would have us dominated.

It feels bad to 4-bet and fold, but our jacks are in bad shape against a likely very narrow range from UTG+1.

Folding is the best play.