DECISION POINT: In a live $1-2 Cash Game a Middle Position Player raises to $8 over a single limper. You reraise to $26 from the Big Blind with J♠J♦ and Villain shoves all-in for $73. Action is on you , what do you do here?

PRO ANSWER: Our opponent raises in Middle Position over a single limper. In the Big Blind we hold JJ, which is well ahead of Villains’ range in this spot. We re-raise to $26 and the Middle Position player shoves all-in.

This situation comes up quite frequently in lower stakes games where people are either buying in short or not topping their stacks up after their losses.

First thing we have to do here is put our opponents on a reasonable range. We have shown a lot of strength here re-raising out of the Blinds vs a Middle Position isolation raise. However, with our opponent having just less than three times our raise in their initial starting stack they are likely to continue with a wider range than if they had more chips. Something like TT+/AQ+ is a reasonable range to put the Middle Position player on here.

Getting over 2:1 on our call here, anything with 33%+ equity or greater is a call. Against TT+/AQ+ we are 46.9% equity here, which is a VERY profitable call (even though we are losing more often than we win).

Even in a worst case scenario where our opponent is only shoving QQ+/AK here we have 36.2% equity, which is well over the required threshold to call.

Calling is the best play.

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