DECISION POINT: You are in the middle stages of a tournament with blinds at 500/1,000 with a 1,000 big blind ante at a table with several good, aggressive players. The action folds to the Button who raises to 2.5BBs, the Small Blind folds, and you call from the Big Blind with A♣8♣. The 6♠2♣J♠ flop gets checked around. You check on the 6♦ turn and the Button bets 2BBs. Action is on you, what do you do here?

PRO ANSWER: We are in the middle stages of a tournament with a big blind ante in play. The effective stacks for this hand are 50 big blinds and we are a tough table with a number of very good, aggressive players. Everyone folds around to the Button who raises to 2.5BBs and action folds to us with Ac8c in the Big Blind.

Against tough opponents A8s fits squarely into the “call” category considering we only have to call 1.5BBs with 5BBs already in the pot against an opponent with a very wide opening hand range. At different stack depths some of the Axs hands make sense to mix in as 3-bets, however at 50BBs effective 3-betting out of position may put us in an awkward position when we do get called or the Button chooses to 4-bet. Given these factors our 3-betting range will be quite polarized. Our specific hand, A8s, presents a difficult decision as it is too strong to fit into a bluffing range but too weak to be a part of our value range.

We do call and the flop is 6s2cJs. When we call from the Big Blind in a single raised pot vs just one opponent the default strategy will be to check to the preflop raiser with our entire range. There are some very dynamic flops where leading with a part of our range does make some sense but those are few and far between. We check and the Button checks behind.

The turn is the 6d. We still just have ace high and did not turn any backdoor or significant draws. This is a spot where we could potentially choose to lead out with a bet. Our range is fairly uncapped here since we would check nearly 100% of our hands on the flop as part of a solid defense strategy. In contrast, the Button has capped their range by checking the turn as they are likely to bet with most strong hands in that spot.

Attacking capped ranges is a strong play and something we could potentially do here with a decent chunk of our range. Ace high is one of those hands in our range with a ton of showdown value here that is unlikely to get a call from a worse hand and also unlikely to get a better hand to fold with a single bet. Solver solutions show a mixed strategy of both betting and checking in this spot with nearly equal frequency, and in real time we decide to check.

Our opponent bets 2BBs. If we were against a weaker player who would never bluff, making an exploitative fold could be potentially viable here. Against tougher opposition however, if we’re folding ace high to a less than one third pot bet on the turn after checking twice on this board we are folding WAY too often.

Ace high is easily in the top half of our range in this particular situation and the Button only needs to get a fold a little less than 25% of the time to make their bet a profitable play. Appropriate defense frequencies are an important part of profitable play from out of position, and folding here would mean we are giving up way too much equity to our opponent overall in these situations in the long run.

Calling is the best play.