DECISION POINT: In a live $1-2 game an Early Position player limps, a Middle Position player raises to $10, and it folds to the Button who calls. You reraise to $40 from the Small Blind with A♣K♣. The UTG+1 player folds and both MP1 and the Button call. On the K♥7♣6♠ flop you bet $80 and MP1 moves all-in for $276. The Button folds and action is on you, what do you do here?

PRO ANSWER: Preflop in a $1-2 cash game we are dealt AKs in the Small Blind. UTG+1 limps and MP1 raises to $10. It folds around to the Button who calls. While calling and playing our hand speculatively here is profitable, our hand is well ahead of a Middle Position raiser’s range. Reraising is a very good play for us. The standard reraise size is 3 times the initial raise amount plus an additional $10 to account for the caller for total of $40. Often times out of position we want to raise a little more to compensate for the fact that we will have to act first on future streets. With that in mind we should raise to $50 here, but in the moment we raised to $40 and both of our opponents called.

The flop is Kh7c6s and action is on us. In this situation the stack to pot ratio (SPR) is just over 2. Typically with an SPR under the 3-4 range we should never fold top pair/top kicker without some sort of opponent specific read. Our plan in this spot should be to attempt to maximize our value against our opponent’s ranges.

This is a great opportunity in a multiway pot on a dry board with a low SPR to size down our bet a bit to allow hands like 88-JJ to put additional money into the pot with very few outs. In this situation we should bet one-third to one-half pot, however in the moment we opt to make it $80 and MP1 moves all-in. The Button folds and action is on us.

We’ve made a few mistakes in this hand. We could have sized up our initial raise size preflop and sized down our continuation bet here. As played our hand is simply too strong in this low SPR spot to ever consider folding.

Calling is the best play.

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