DECISION POINT: Preflop, it folded to the Hijack who raised. It folds to you in the Small Blind with 8♥8♣. You reraise and the Hijack calls. The flop comes Q♥6♥A♥. Action is on you, what do you do?

PRO ANSWER: In this live $1/$2 cash game, the Hijack player raises to the table standard of $12 or 6 BBs. This opponent had $112 in their stack (56 BBs). Given the raise comes from the Hijack seat, we can put this player on a relatively wide hand range, including many high card hands, all pairs and some suited connector type hands.

If we call preflop and play our 88 for set value alone, we will not win enough chips postflop on average to make up for our preflop investment. If we call and play our 88 as a one pair hand, we will often be faced with difficult postflop decisions on future streets. Playing a medium pair out of position postflop will generally cause us to win a small pot or lose a big pot. Reraising preflop is the best play.

Once on the flop, there is only one pot sized bet left in the effective stack since our opponent has $76 behind and there is $74 in the pot. Moving all-in is the best play, since we can sometimes get our opponent to fold better hands than ours such as 99 or TT with no heart. In order for us to have very little equity, our opponent would need to have both a bigger pair AND a bigger heart. More often, our opponent has neither or only one.

Putting our opponent all-in on the this flop is the best play.