DECISION POINT: In the middle stages of the WPT World Championship blinds are 1,500/3,000 with a 3,000 big blind ante you are dealt J♦J♠ in the MP1 seat. It folds to you and you make a standard raise to 6,000, the MP2 player reraises to 24,000, the rest of the table folds, and you call. The 9♣9♦8♥ flop goes check-check. You bet 35,000 on the 6♠ turn and MP2 calls. The river is the 3♦ and action is on you.

What do you do here?

PRO ANSWER: We are in the middle stages of a large field multi-table tournament. The blinds are 1,500/3,000 with a 3,000 big blind ante. We have just over 40 big blinds with a collection of stacks between 15 big blinds and 40 big blinds and a few players that have us covered with approximately 60 big blinds in their stack.

We are dealt JdJs in MP1 and both the Early Position players fold. We make a standard raise for this point in the tournament to 6,000 and the player in MP2 to our immediate left makes it 24,000. Everyone else folds and action is on us.

If we are against a very tight player who didn’t 3-bet anything but a very narrow range like QQ+/AK we could exploitatively fold. The same holds true if the table was extremely soft and getting into a potentially big confrontation here denies us the opportunity to continue to exploit an unusually soft table.

However, seeing as neither of those scenarios are present, we must assume competent MTT regulars will be 3-betting a much wider range against a minimum open and pocket Jacks is too strong to fold. If we analyze this spot in a solver the output recommends a mix of both calling and moving all-in, with a small portion of the time having a 4-bet as an option. We elect to just call and keep our opponent’s range wide.

The flop is 9c9d8h. With over 55,000 in the pot and an effective stack of 106,000 we are likely committed to playing for stacks on this flop. Our opponent should be betting nearly 100% of the time on this board and since we called preflop to keep bluffs in their range, it makes sense to keep checking and allow them to bluff with hands we beat as well as some of their stronger value hands that beat us. We check and our opponent also checks.

Given the pot and stack size there are no hands our opponent is supposed to be checking in this spot, in fact the solver output shows MP2 betting 100% of the time. If we try to assign a range, the likely makeup in this spot includes preflop bluffs that decided to give up as well as a few monster hands, perhaps 99/88 or A9s if they’re 3-betting that wide preflop.

The turn is the 6s. In a situation with deeper stacks we could continue to play our hand passively and just try and get to a controlled showdown keeping MP2's range wide and letting them potentially bluff with missed hands. However, given we have a shallow stack in this hand, it is a HUGE misplay if we allow hands like AK/AQ or even bluffs like A5s that have 7 outs to draw a free card and take this pot, which represents 50% of our stack.

Our goal is to bet enough to clear out hands in MP1’s range that have some equity against us but can’t really call any reasonable bet. A sizing of around half pot should be more than enough to serve that purpose. We bet a little more than that for 35,000 and MP2 calls.

The river is the 3d. At this point the pot is large in relation to remaining stacks and pocket jacks are too high up in our range to ever really fold without some sort of read that MP2 is incapable of ever betting a worse hand. It’s tough for our opponent to have many bluffs since JTs is the most logical bluff and we hold two of the jacks. Hands such as TT/77/A7s may potentially be in MP2’s range on the river, and if we check those hands are likely to check behind. We may also be able to extract value from those hands by betting.

Reviewing the solver output for the river decision we see the preferred line is moving all-in to maximize value against the hands we beat while, even though we will still lose a very small portion of the time to the AA/99/88/A9s in MP2’s range that slowplayed the flop.

Moving all-in is the best play.