DECISION POINT: You are in the early stages of a large field WSOP $600 buy-in tournament and blinds are 200/400 with a 400 big blind ante. The play at the table has been passive without much raising or reraising preflop. Most stacks around the table are 50BBs with the exception of a few in the 30BB range. Action folds around to you on the Button with J♠T♠ and you open the standard 2.5x raise to 1,000. The Small Blind folds, the Big Blind reraises to 3,000, and you call. Your opponent bets 3,000 on the K♠T♦T♣ flop and action is on you.

What do you do here?

PRO ANSWER: We are in the earlier stages of a large field $600 buy-in World Series of Poker event. There are still thousands of players remaining and our table has been playing relatively passive without a lot of raising and reraising preflop. The blinds are 200/400 with a 400 big blind ante and the majority of stacks at the table are at 50BBs to start the hand.

We are dealt J♠T♠ on the Button, everyone folds to us, and we make a standard opening raise to 1,000 chips. The Small Blind folds and the Big Blind reraises to 3,000 chips. Given our read, this is likely a premium holding from the Big Blind but will still include a lot of hands we have significant equity against like AK/AQ. Additionally, we have position and are getting favorable pot odds with 4,600 chips in the middle and only having to call 2,000 more.

We call and the flop is K♠T♦T♣. The Big Blind comes out firing with a bet of 3,000 chips. It can be tempting for us to put in a raise here given that stacks are already somewhat shallow, we flopped trips, and our opponent has a fairly tight range.

That being said, we are likely to win all the chips the times when our opponent has hands like AK/AA, and we are likely to lose all our chips when they have KK or Tx with a bigger kicker.

Based on these scenarios our biggest consideration should be how to maximize profit against the other parts of their range including hands like AQ/AJ/QQ/JJ. Those hands are all drawing extremely thin, and when we raise they can easily find a fold.

By just calling, we allow the Big Blind to potentially make mistakes on future streets with some of the hands we are ahead of that they might otherwise fold to a raise. With stacks being relatively shallow in relation to the pot, we can also easily get the rest of the chips in on future streets quite naturally in position. Against much of our opponent’s range, this hand will play out similarly if we call or raise.

However, in these large field tournaments it is extremely important that we give ourselves every opportunity to win big pots with big hands and allow our opponents every opportunity to make mistakes.

Calling is the best play.