DECISION POINT: You are playing in a 6-handed $1/$1 home cash game with stacks ranging from around 100BBs to 500BBs. Everyone folds to the Cutoff (with 240BBs) who opens to $3. The Button and Small Blind fold and you call from the Big Blind with J♠5♠. You check the 4♦3♣7♦ flop, your opponent bets $3, and action is on you.

What do you do here?

PRO ANSWER: We are playing in a $1/$1 cash home game. The stacks are deep with multiple players having over $500 in front of them. We are in the Big Blind and are dealt Js5s. Everyone folds to the Cutoff with $240 who opens to $3. The Button and Small Blind fold and action is on us. While J5s isn’t a very strong hand, there is $5 in the middle and only $2 to call and we close the action so we’re guaranteed to see a flop. This is absolutely a hand we should be defending within this spot and we do elect to call.

The flop is 7d4d3c. This is a board that significantly favors the preflop caller. In fact, if we look at this spot in a solver the output recommends doing a fair amount of leading from the Big Blind (commonly called donk betting) on this board around 40% of the time. Our specific hand falls into the part of our range that prefers leading here, however in real-time we decide to check and our opponent bets $3 into the $7 pot.

Even though we only have an inside straight draw and an overcard, folding here would be a mistake. Inside straight draws are often good candidates to consider check-raising with, as weaker draws rarely have enough immediate pot odds to call. If we can generate significant fold equity to go along with our inside straight outs, it’s a huge win when we get the Cutoff to fold hands such as AJ or K9. Since we often have three additional outs to our jack in this particular hand, we could profitably call in this spot as well.

Taking a deeper look into the solver output after we elect to check the flop and the Cutoff c-bets, we see that J5s prefers a mix of calling and check-raising. While it may seem uncomfortable to check-raise this spot with no pair and just a draw, it’s essential that we get aggressive with some of the hands in our range that don’t hit as part of a balanced Big Blind Defense strategy.

As long as we don’t fold in this spot against this particular c-bet size, we will have played the hand correctly.

Calling or raising are both correct plays.