DECISION POINT: In a $1-2 6-max cash game the first player to act raises to $5 and the Hijack calls. The Cutoff and Button fold, you call from the Small Blind with 6♥7♥, and the Big Blind folds. The 3♥K♥T♣ flop gets checked to the Hijack who bets $12, you call, and MP2 folds. You check the 6♣ turn and Hijack bets $21. Action is on you, what do you do here?

PRO ANSWER: We are playing a $1-2 6-max cash game where most of the stacks are around $200. We are dealt 6♥7♥ in the Small Blind. The first player to act raises to $5 and the Hijack calls. Everyone else folds and action is on us.

Suited connectors are great speculative hands where you can potentially call preflop. When the call amount is a small percentage of the effective stack and there are multiple players in the pot you can potentially get paid off if you were to hit a big hand. In this spot we have to call $4 more with over $200 in the effective stack, so a call represents around 2% of our stack against at least two opponents. This a great spot to call with our hand speculatively. The Big Blind folds and we are off to the flop.

The board comes 3♥K♥T♣ and action is on us with a flush draw. If we lead into the preflop raiser here and they raise our bet that would be disastrous. There is really no reason here to deviate from the standard play of checking to the preflop raiser and we do just that.

The preflop raiser checks this very coordinated board and then the Hijack seat bets $12. We’re getting around 2.5:1 direct pot odds on the flop to call here with a hand that has about 20% equity when behind. We’ll often have more equity in this spot since we’ll win sometimes when a 6 or 7 comes on the turn or river but by default we will estimate conservatively. This means we don’t need to make up much in implied odds on future streets to make calling here a good investment for our hand and we do elect to do just that.

The turn is the 6♣ and now we have a pair to go with our draw. Again there is no reason to bet here as we are only likely to get called by hands that beat us and most of the hands we beat have few outs to catch up. We do check and the Hijack bets $21.

This time we are getting around 3:1 on our money and we picked up additional outs. Adding the 2 additional sixes and 3 additional sevens to our outs when behind we now have 14 outs, which is roughly 30% to hit on the river.

Getting 3:1 on our money with nearly 2:1 odds against hitting our hand on the river means this is a great spot for us to continue. Add the fact that sometimes a pair of sixes is the best hand here this is a slam dunk to call.

Calling is the best play.

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