DECISION POINT: In a live $2-5 game an Early Position player limps and it folds to you on the Button with 8♠8♥. You raise to $20 and the Big Blind (who is a very aggressive player) 3-bets to $75. The UTG player folds and you call. The Big Blind bets $75 on the T♣6♠2♥ flop and you call. The turn comes the 4♠, the Big Blind bets $200, and you call. On the 2♣ river the Big Blind bets $450 putting you all-in. Action is on you, what do you do here?

PRO ANSWER: We are playing a $2-5 cash game with a very aggressive player in the Big Blind who has managed to accumulate $2,500 in chips. We’ve seen this player triple barrel with both bluffs and made hands and is generally very aggressive.

We are dealt pocket 8s on the Button and the UTG player limps. It folds to us and we raise to $20. If we only started the hand with $500, calling preflop would be a much better option as we have a very aggressive player in the Big Blind. By choosing to raise we would open up for the Big Blind to raise to $60-$80 making it very difficult to call the 3-bet with a shorter stack.

With an $800 starting stack however, we can apply a mixed strategy of raising or limping behind. If we have a read on the table and raising is more likely to get us heads up in position versus the aggressive player, then raising would be preferred over calling.

The Big Blind reraises to $75 and the UTG player folds. In position against an aggressive player this is a very straightforward call for us preflop and that is what we do. The flop is Tc6s2h which is one of the better flops for us that doesn’t contain an 8.

There are unlikely to be many Tx hands in the Big Blind’s 3-betting range here preflop, except for TT perhaps. This means their range likely consists of complete misses such as AK/AQ or even A5s/A4s if those combos are in their preflop bluffing range, and overpairs. Villain continuation bets $75, and since there are far more misses in our opponent’s range than over pairs or Tx hands this is a fairly straightforward call for us.

The turn is a 4s and that doesn’t really change much for us. We know our opponent to be very aggressive with their misses. The 4s gives A4s/A5s type hands in the Big Blinds range more outs, but doesn’t significantly improve their range on this board. Our opponent bets $200 into the $307 pot and given our read this is again a pretty straightforward call.

The river is the 2c and our opponent puts us all-in for $450. Against opponents not capable of triple barreling here with a very wide range, this could be a spot where giving up on our second pair hand (technically two pair, but one is on the board) would be reasonable. If our opponent has a hypothetical range of AQ+/TT+ here they would have 32 combinations of hands that we beat (16 each of AQ/AK) and 27 combos that beat us (6 each of JJ-AA and 3 of TT).

Given our read that the Big Blind’s triple barreling range is very wide, they could very easily have at least as many bluffs in their range as made hands, and we are getting nearly 3:1 pot odds. Against an aggressive player such as this specific opponent, we must call.

Calling is the best play.

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