DECISION POINT: In a live $1-2 game action folds to you in the Small Blind with A♠A♦. You raise to $6 and the Big Blind calls. The flop 9♠T♠T♦, you continuation bet $6 and your opponent calls. The turn is the 9♣ and action is on you. What do you do here?

PRO ANSWER: We are playing in a $1-2 cash game where most of the players have around $200 effective stacks. We’ve chipped up a little to $246 but have no significant information on the players with us at the table. Action folds around and we find A♠A♦ in the Small Blind and make a standard raise to $6 and the Big Blind just flat calls.

The flop is 9♠T♠T♦. This flop definitely tends to hit a preflop calling range much better than a preflop raising range. That means that when analyzing our hand range vs our opponent’s hand range they have the overall range advantage, even though with aces we are near the top of our range. Given that the Big Blind has the overall range advantage, our flop strategy is going to involve checking more frequently than normal and utilizing a ⅔ - ¾ pot size betting strategy on the flop as opposed to a smaller ⅓ pot c-bet sizing.

Since we are near the top of our range (and hold the As) this is definitely a hand where betting makes sense and we should bet in the $8-$9 range. However, in the moment we elected to go with a half pot bet size of $6 and the Big Blind calls.

The turn is the 9♣. This is probably one of the worst turn cards we could have seen. Many players are tempted to bet here to deny equity from our opponent’s drawing hands as straight and flush draws are still a very real part of the Big Blind’s overall range. However if we consider what hands are worse that would call or what hands we block, there is a real problem with betting this turn.

Most of the worse hands that could call our bet here such as JJ-KK that likely would have reraised us preflop are either not likely in their range, or hands that we block such as ace high that would be a reasonable call on the turn but is far less likely given we hold 2 aces.

Even though our opponent does have some draws in their range in a Blind vs Blind battle on this flop they should be floating our flop bet with a very wide range that would include under pairs (22-88) and back door flush draws (two diamonds) in addition to a wide variety of other hands with some flop equity.

If we check here our opponent likely has a very wide variety of hands they can potentially turn into bluffs that we can get additional value from. If we bet there are very few hands we are likely to get value from that can call a bet here. In addition, the times our opponent does have 9x or Tx we likely lose less money taking a passive line to showdown than if we continue our aggression on the turn.

Checking is the best play.