DECISION POINT: In a Tournament with deep stacks, action folds to a Middle Position player with a 200BB stack who raises to 3BBs. The Hijack, who started with just over 100BB calls, and you call from the Cutoff with A♥3♥ and just over 200BBs. The Button and both Blinds fold. On the 5♥5♠J♥ flop the MP player bets 5BBs, the Hijack folds, and you raise to 15BBs. The Middle Position player calls and we see a 9♣ on the turn. Your opponent checks and action is on you.

What do you do here?

PRO ANSWER: In general, we must be willing to adopt a strategy that prefers to exert pressure with drawing hands in order to play them profitably. Semi-bluffing with draws allows us to win the hand in two different ways, by hitting a draw or by forcing our opponents to fold through aggressive action.

In this deep stacked scenario from a tournament we chose to raise the flop as a semi-bluff, but were called by the preflop raiser. Deciding between checking behind with our draw or following up with a turn bet depends on how well our hand range and MP1’s hand range interact on this texture.

Considering the layout of this board a turn bet is likely to force a fold from MP1 a decent portion of the time. As the second caller of the preflop raise, hands with a 5 (which are now trips) are far more likely to be in our hand range than in our opponent’s hand range. Therefore we can represent a 5 very credibly in this spot, while it is much harder for MP1 to represent 5x hands as the preflop raiser.

In situations where our opponent chooses to continue against a reasonable turn bet, they will most do so through calling and will rarely check-raise. Given these factors we can freely exert additional pressure on the turn by following up with another bet.

This turn bet is targeting the portions of MP1’s range that can continue against the flop raise but are likely to fold to continued aggression including one-pair hands and various Jx combos. When our turn bet fails to force a fold we still have plenty of backup equity and a significant number of outs going to the river in most cases.

Betting again on this turn is the best play.