DECISION POINT: You are in a 6-handed Tournament with blinds at 1,000/2,000 with a 2,000 big blind ante. The first player to act raises to 4,500, action folds to you in the Big Blind with J♥T♥ and you make the call. The K♥8♠7♥ flop is checked around. The turn comes 6♣ and action is on you.

What do you do here?

PRO ANSWER: We are in the middle to late stages of a 6-handed multi-table tournament with 1,000/2,000 blinds and a 2,000 big blind ante. We are dealt JhTh in the Big Blind and the first player to act raises to 4,500. Everyone else folds and action is on us.

With our specific hand JTs both calling and shoving are fine options. If we run this scenario through a preflop simulation, the results suggest shoving around 70% of the time and calling 30%.

In real-time our decision may also depend on specific opponent reads. If we had information that our opponent had a large range gap between the hands they open and the ones they call with, shoving would be better. If the opponent is observed to be opening on the tighter side or calls reshoves on the looser side, calling would be better. We chose to call.

The flop is Kh8s7h giving us an inside straight draw and a flush draw. In this spot it can feel tempting to lead and generate some fold equity, however the preflop raiser has a significant range advantage on this board so a majority of our range wants to check to the preflop raiser. We check and our opponent checks behind. The turn is the 6c.

When our opponent checks behind on the flop it typically caps their range, particularly on a board that favors them that’s fairly coordinated such as this one. While it does cap their range, it also narrows their range to mostly hands with some sort of showdown equity, such as ace high or bottom pair. Hands with little showdown equity are very likely to continuation bet this flop that’s favorable for MP2’s range.

This concept is important because we want to construct our turn betting range so that we’re firing two barrels (turn and river) a decent percentage of the time to put maximum pressure on MP2’s capped range. It’s also important to note that our range is uncapped since we would check even our strongest hands on the flop such as 87s/K8s.

These factors make JT suited a great candidate for betting the turn. We block the T9s straight draw as well as some of their strongest hands that might check the flop such as JJ/TT. We will also likely be able to fire the river a decent percentage of the time given we have 12 outs to improve to a flush or a straight and will be able to mix in some bluffs as well.

The important consideration is how much we should bet in this spot. If our bet size is too large we run the risk of having to call if our opponent shoves the turn, as well as not having enough chips behind on the river to generate reasonable fold equity when we want to bluff. The optimal bet size is around half pot.

Betting (half pot) is the best play.