DECISION POINT: You are in the early stages of a daily tournament with blinds at 50/100 and a 100 big blind ante. Most of the table has around 40-50BBs except you and the Button who have chipped up to 100BBs. You open to 250 from UTG and only the Button calls. The flop comes 3♣3♥3♦ and action is on you.

What do you do here?

PRO ANSWER: We are in the early stages of a daily tournament with 50/100 blinds and a 100 big blind ante. The majority of players at the table have stacks around 40-50 big blinds, while we’ve chipped up to almost 100BBs along with the player seated on the Button.

We are dealt AsKd UTG and raise to 250. Everyone folds except the Button who flat calls, and the flop is 3c3h3d. When deciding if we should continuation bet, one of the primary considerations is to determine which player holds the range advantage.

In this particular hand we have a tremendous range advantage. Our opening range is uncapped and still contains all of the big pairs, while the Button’s range is unlikely to have hands like AA, KK, or QQ and will mostly be composed of hands like 87s or QTs that are significantly behind our overall range on this flop.

When considering the proper bet size for this situation, it’s also important to determine which player holds the nut advantage. The strongest combo that will make quads in this spot is A3s and is in both the UTG and Button ranges, however only we as the first-in raiser from UTG are likely to have the big pairs. Since we have a significant nut advantage and stacks are deep, we can comfortably apply maximum pressure to many of the hand combinations in the Button’s defense calling range.

To illustrate just how much of an overall advantage we have in this spot, according to the output from a GTO solver the preferred bet sizing with our hand is 150% of the pot. While any continuation bet size is profitable, this is a spot where betting big threatens our opponent’s entire stack.

The Button will have an incredibly hard time calling multiple bets and getting to showdown in this spot, even with some of the strongest hands in their range such as pocket eights.

Betting big is the best play.