DECISION POINT: You are in the money at the end of day 1 of a multi-day live main event tournament with blinds at 3,000/5,000 with a 5,000 big blind ante. The Under the Gun player raises to 11,000, action folds to you in the Big Blind with K♦3♦ and you call. You check the J♦8♠7♣ flop, your opponent bets 10,000, and action is on you.

What do you do here?

PRO ANSWER: We are in the money in the late stages of a multi-day live main event tournament. We play one more level before the end of day 1. There is no monetary reward for making day 2, but often there is a “mini bubble” effect that happens where people don’t want to bust out toward the very end of day 1. The blinds are 3,000/5,000 with a 5,000 big blind ante.

We are dealt K♦3♦ in the Big Blind. The UTG player makes it 11,000 and everyone folds to us. Against this small of a raise, getting 4:1 pot odds on our call defending with suited hands is standard at this stack depth. With K3s we do decide to call.

On the flop of J♦8♠7♣, which we elect to check as part of a default defense strategy from the Big Blind, our opponent continuation bets 10,000 into a 30,000 chip pot.

Recognizing situations where our opponents are likely to be betting their entire range and finding good spots to check-raise to pick up extra chips is essential to proper Big Blind defense strategy. Combos that contain an overcard to the board and have a backdoor flush draw are an excellent choice in these scenarios.

Taking a closer look at this flop and how it interacts with our range, even though we will be defending with a lot of hands that connect with this board, we will also have many that completely miss including our K3s. The UTG player has a fairly narrow range that includes a lot of sets and overpairs and thus has a tremendous range advantage.

When picking hands to check-raise on this flop, most of our range is going to revolve around 9x combinations. This is because we want to have some equity when our opponent continues, and we don’t want to hold cards in our hand that make those hands less likely as our check-raise is targeting hands like AK and KQ in UTG’s range. The primary issue is that K3s blocks these specific combos we are trying to fold out on the flop, even though it does have backdoor equity plus overcard composition that we look for in a check-raising hand.

When defending from the Big Blind against smaller preflop raises we must always be on the lookout for good spots to aggressively check-raise postflop as part of a sound Big Blind defense strategy. However in this spot the circumstances just aren’t good enough to choose an aggressive line.

Folding is the best play.