DECISION POINT: You are playing one of the first hands in a live daily tournament with blinds at 100/200 and a 200 big blind ante. Action folds to you on the Button and you raise to 500 with 5♣5♥. The Small Blind folds and the Big Blind calls. Your opponent checks the Q♣Q♥9♥ flop and action is on you.

What do you do here?

PRO ANSWER: We are playing early in a live daily tournament. The blinds are 100/200 with a 200 big blind ante and it’s one of the first hands dealt so nearly all of the field is still remaining. We are dealt 5c5h on the Button and everyone folds to us. We make it 500 chips and just the Big Blind calls. The flop is QcQh9h and the Big Blind checks.

One of the first questions we want to ask ourselves when deciding if we should continuation bet in a heads up pot is “Who has the range advantage?”. While there are some Qx combinations in our opponent’s calling range, our range contains far more AQ/KQ and bigger Qx hands plus hands like 99/QQ/KK/AA. All of these are hands that our opponent would have likely reraised with preflop.

Additionally, the Big Blind is defending with a wider range of overall hands than we are opening with on the Button, so even the hands we both share (such as Q6s) make up a larger percentage of our range than our opponent’s range. Anytime we have a tremendous range advantage like this, we can c-bet with nearly our entire range.

Taking a closer look at this situation with the help of a solver, we see the output confirms this as the recommendation is to continuation bet nearly 80% of the time here with our entire range.

Now that we’ve verified that c-betting is effective here at a high frequency, the next step is to determine how much to bet. Given that we are going to be betting this flop at such a high frequency, the preferred sizing is on the smaller side at around one-third pot.

This allows our big hands to still get action from weaker hands that the Big Blind will be defending in this spot, even as weak as Ace high in some instances. Given that we have a small pair that is an underpair to the board, we’re really just looking to get some hands with significant equity such as 76s to fold which would be a huge win in this scenario.

When our c-bet gets called it’s not a terrible outcome, as we are still in position and in a decent spot to realize our equity.

Continuation betting small is the best play.