DECISION POINT: You are in a live $1/$3 cash game where play has been conservative preflop yet features looser play with marginal holdings postflop. You’ve been capitalizing on the poor postflop play and increased your stack to $1,500. The average stack is around $300 with the exception of the UTG player who has $1,000. The UTG player raises to the standard for this table of $10, a Middle Position player calls, and the Button calls. Action is on you in the Big Blind with J♠J♦.

What do you do here?

PRO ANSWER: We are playing a low-stakes $1/$3 live cash game. We’ve managed to run hot and build our stack up to $1,500, with one other player at the table also having a stack of at least $1,000. Our remaining 6 opponents have stacks in the $300 range. Play has been fairly conservative preflop, however players are more than willing to mix it up with marginal holdings postflop and we’ve been exploiting these mistakes to build our stack.

We are dealt JsJd in the Big Blind. The UTG player opens to $10, which is the standard opening raise for this game. MP1 and the Button both call. The Small Blind folds and action is on us.

If we treat preflop decision making like a multiple choice test, the easiest thing to evaluate first is whether calling is profitable. Utilizing the preflop calling criteria we can ask ourselves “do we have a speculative hand?”. The speculative hand category includes pocket pairs, suited connectors, suited 1-gap, suited 2-gap, and suited Ax combinations. In this case, pocket jacks could be played speculatively to flop a set.

The next step in evaluating the profitability of a call is to determine whether the pot is multiway. With three additional opponents involved in the hand along with the original Under the Gun raiser, the answer is clearly yes.

Lastly, we need to determine whether the amount of the call is equal to 5% or less than the effective stack. With these deep stacks, we are well within the threshold as the call amount equals barely 1% of the effective stacks.

When using the calling criteria and your given hand meets all three of the conditions, it’s important to take the additional step and decide whether raising will be more profitable than calling.

In this hand the Villain raised from early position which is likely to represent a fairly narrow range. Given our observation during the session that our opponents are fairly conservatively preflop, the likely raising range for UTG should be even narrower. Any reasonable reraise sizing (default is 5-6x the original raise) is likely to put us in a tough spot when called. We could end up playing out of position postflop with deep stacks against UTG, or find ourselves pot-committed against any of three shorter stacked opponents.

Based on these factors it is unlikely that raising is more profitable than calling, so the best play is to call and proceed with caution if we don’t hit a set.

Calling is the best play.