DECISION POINT: You are in the early stages of a Monster Stack tournament. Players started with 500BBs deep and your table is a mix of strong players and recreational players who call often. Blinds are 500/1,000 with a 1,000 big blind ante and most stacks are over 100,000. Action folds to you in the MP1 seat, you raise to the 2,500 table standard with K♥K♣ and only the Button calls. You continuation bet 2,500 on the 7♥8♥J♣ flop and get called. The J♥ turn gets checked and the river is the K♦. You rivered a full house and action is on you.

What do you do here?

PRO ANSWER: We are approaching the middle stages of a Monster Stack tournament where everyone started 500bbs deep. The table is a solid mix of stronger players, as well as recreational players who are calling too often both preflop and postflop. The blinds are 500/1,000 with a 1,000 big blind ante and most of the stacks are over 100,000.

The action folds around and we make a table standard raise to 2,500 with KhKc in MP1. We get a single caller on the Button. The flop is Jc8h7h and action is on us. Larger continuation bet sizing is often preferred on coordinated boards to protect our hand.

However, this particular flop is very good for the Button’s calling range and we hold the Kh which blocks multiple draws. Additionally, there are also a ton of scare cards that can come on the turn and river which can make this tricky to navigate and maximize value with a SPR (stack to pot ratio) of over 10.

Reviewing this hand in a solver we are surprised to see suggested action with our hand mixes checking, betting ⅓ pot, and betting full pot at almost equal frequency. In real-time we elect to continue our preflop aggression with a small continuation bet of 2,500 and the Button calls. The turn is the Jh.

On the surface, this seems like one of the worst cards in the deck for us. We still have a significant range advantage given our range contains more big Jx hands, overpairs with a heart, and Axhh than our opponent. The solver recommends a mix of betting small and checking the turn.

In real-time we check and our opponent checks behind.

The river is the beautiful Kd giving us a full house. For all practical purposes we have the nuts now, as the Button is unlikely to have checked back JJ on the turn given the coordinated flop. When we decide to bet on this river, we often have a very polarized range. On the top end we have Kx hands that continuation bet the flop, gave up on the turn, then got there on the river. The polarized river betting range will also have a lot of overcards with backdoor clubs and QT/Q9 hands that had some flop equity and elected to continuation bet as a bluff.

Any time we are in a spot where a polarized betting range is likely, it should signal that we can potentially go for a larger bet sizing. Even though the Button’s range looks quite weak, a larger sizing will often contain many of our bluff combos and will certainly appear that way given action in the hand to this point.

It’s not an intuitive play, but overbetting makes a lot of sense. The solver agrees with our assessment, as the highest EV play on the river is to overbet the pot to 15,000, with a small frequency of betting small to 3,000 to balance out the mixed strategy.

Betting either very large with our polarized range or very small to target hands like TT/99 both make theoretical sense in this spot, with overbetting having a slightly higher EV according to the solver.

Overbetting the pot is the best play.