DECISION POINT: You are 10-handed in the middle stages of a daily tournament with blinds at 400/800 and a 800 big blind ante and you have no specific reads on your opponents. The UTG player min-raises to 1,600 and you call from UTG+1 with J♦J♥. Actions folds to the Button who calls and both Blinds fold. The UTG player bets 3,200 on the K♣Q♣J♣ flop and both you and the Button call. On the T♥ turn UTG bets 5,100 and action is on you.

What do you do here?

PRO ANSWER: We are in the middle stages of a daily tournament with 400/800 blinds and a 800 big blind ante. Most of the stacks are in the 40-50BB range and the tables are 10-handed. The UTG player minimum raises to 1,600 and we look down at J♦J♥ in the UTG+1 seat.

At this stack depth and at a 10-handed table this minraise should be a fairly narrow range of opening hands. We could elect to reraise with pocket jacks, however given the number of players still to act behind us coupled with UTG’s likely narrow range we will often face some difficult situations by inflating the pot preflop so we elect to call. Consulting the solver output for this spot, we see a mix of calling and reraising with the solver mostly preferring to call. Everyone else folds except the Button who also calls the 2x preflop raise.

The flop is K♣Q♣J♣ and we flop a set on an extremely coordinated board. The UTG player leads for 3,200, just slightly less than half the pot. Raising with our set in this spot would make it extremely difficult to get all-in as a significant favorite. Our opponents would likely only get all-in on the flop if they have us beat or have significant equity such as a big combo straight and flush draw.

However we do often have the best hand on the flop, and when behind we usually have seven outs to improve on the turn, and ten outs to improve on the river the times we miss on the turn. We decide to call and the Button calls as well.

The turn is the T♥ and the UTG player bets 5,100. The Ten coming on the turn creates an open-ended 4 card straight on the board and makes it much less likely we have the best hand now as both opponents' ranges will contain Ax hands. At this point our decision is reduced primarily to a math problem.

We likely have ten outs, so we’re roughly 20% to win the hand. That means we need at least 4:1 pot odds, plus believe we have implied odds to stack one or both opponents when we fill up. There are times where we are drawing dead against a straight flush or drawing thin against KK/QQ, but conversely we also have some additional Ace outs to a chop and will still also have the best hand a small percentage of the time on this scary board.

In multiway spots such as this it is important to guard against considering all of our outs live in real-time, and on some occasions we’ll face a raise from behind by the Button and be forced to reevaluate continuing. Given the direct pot odds we are getting in this scenario, plus the potential implied odds of stacking one or both opponents when we improve on the river, taking a passive approach facing turn second bullet with a vulnerable made hand on a scary board is appropriate.

Calling is the best play.