DECISION POINT: You are six-handed in the middle stages of a Tournament with blinds at 600/1,200 with a 1,200 big blind ante. The Middle Position player limps, you limp behind from the Hijack with 5♦7♦, and the Cutoff calls. The Button folds, the Small Blind completes, and the Big Blind checks. The SB checks the T♦7♣5♥ flop, the BB bets 1,200, and MP2 calls. Action is on you, what do you do here?

PRO ANSWER: We are playing the middle stages of a tournament with 600/1,200 blinds and a 1,200 big blind ante. There are six players remaining at our table and we are dealt 5♦7♦ in the Hijack seat. MP2 limps first in and action is on us.

We have a suited one gapper that plays well in multiway pots and we have to only call a small amount (less than 5% of the effective stack) with a hand that can potentially win a big pot when it hits. With speculative hands we love small risk, big reward situations and this qualifies as one if the players to our left are passive.

If we had some sort of read at this table that the opponents behind us often liked to raise over the top of limpers then this would be a bad spot to limp behind. However, in more passive games limping behind for a small amount when we are very likely to see a flop is a very +EV play.

In this case we do decide to limp behind MP2. The Cutoff limps behind us, the Button folds, the Small Blind competes, and the Big Blind checks. The flop is T♦7♣5♥ which is a great flop for us with bottom two pair. The Small Blind checks and the Big Blind bets 1,200. MP2 also calls and action is on us. While this is a very coordinated flop with a stack to pot ratio (SPR) of around 4 we would be more than happy to get all the chips in here.

Many players are tempted to slow play in this spot with a big hand however there are a ton of turn cards that may potentially scare off our action. Any 9, 8, or 6 is going to be scary for our opponents. Overcards may scare a hand such as AT that may get all-in against us on this flop but could be far less likely to do so if a Queen comes on the turn.

With such small bet sizing here (1,200 is the minimum sized bet) if we just call we’re allowing our opponents to draw very cheaply when they are behind. This is a great spot to make a raise. Another mistake players often make here is they are used to a standard raise being 3x the opening bet size. In this case, a 3x raise size would be 3,600 which is less than half the pot and we would offer our opponents tremendous odds to call. When opponents bet small we should be looking at the total size of the pot (in this case 9,600 chips) and basing our raise size on that.

A raise to somewhere in the 7,500-10,000 chip range should put our opponents to meaningful decisions and set us up for a nice turn in the event someone calls.

Raising is the best play.

It’s that fundamental question that, as poker players, we all ask ourselves on a regular basis…

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