DECISION POINT: In a $2-5 cash game with tough, skilled players action folds to the Small Blind who opens to 3BBs. You reraise to 9BBs from the Big Blind with A♠3♠ and get called. The Small Blind checks the 2♥8♦9♣ flop, you bet 4.5BBs, and they call. You both check the 3♥ turn. On the A♦ river your opponent checks, you bet 20BBs, and they move all-in. Action is on you, what do you do here?

PRO ANSWER: We are playing in a tough full ring cash game with 100BB effective stacks. We are dealt A3s in the Big Blind and everyone folds to the Small Blind who opens to 3BBs. With A3 a mixed strategy is preferred, meaning a fair portion of the time we just call the raise and around 25% of the time we 3-bet the Small Blind’s open. We are using the suits of our hole cards as a method to randomize. Prior to the session we selected spades as the suit to randomize on, so we do 3-bet to 9BBs and our opponent just calls.

The flop is 2h8d9c and the Small Blind checks. In position as the preflop raiser with wide ranges, we’re going to be continuation betting a vast majority of our range. In this spot specifically we have ace high and benefit a lot from making our opponent fold some random hands like KJ that have a lot of equity against us.

We also have a backdoor straight draw here to potentially pickup equity on future streets when the Small Blind calls our c-bet. On drier boards we will often bet just 25% of pot, however given that this board is fairly coordinated we often want to bump our bet sizing up a bit. A larger sizing is preferred to discourage our opponent from continuing with a portion of hands in their range that have reasonable equity against us. In the moment we default to a smaller c-bet sizing of 4.5BBs and the Small Blind calls.

The turn is the 3h and we’ve picked up some additional equity. The Small Blind checks. At this point continuing to bet is unlikely to get us action from worse hands and we don’t really want to bloat the pot with just 3rd pair. We check behind and go to the river.

The river is the Ad and we make two-pair. The Small Blind checks again and this is the perfect spot for a big value bet. The ace hits our range much better than our opponent’s and when we check behind on the turn there are still a lot of potential bluffs in our range. Since our range is so polarized here when we bet, we will typically have Ax or better or bluff combos and will get to choose a bigger sizing. A larger river bet sizing allows us to get us more value on our big hands as well as make our bluffs more effective. We bet 20BBs into the 27BB pot and the Small Blind moves all-in.

This is a really tricky spot. It is somewhat unlikely that our opponent is going to check-raise for value here with many worse hands, even though there is some AQ/AJ in their preflop range that may play this way. Our small bet on the flop opened the door for them to float with a lot of JT/QT/QJ type hands on the flop that now make excellent bluffing candidates.

Against common low-stakes players who are only likely to be betting with value hands in this spot you can often just fold as an exploitable play. Tougher players are capable of recognizing that this is a spot that should be bluffed quite frequently with a very polarized range. There are more than enough bluff combos and potentially some thin value hands in the Small Bind's range to justify calling here getting around 2:1 on your money.

Since this is a game with very tough and skilled players, folding here would potentially be exploitable and quite -EV.

Calling is the best play.