K♠K♥ on the Turn, what do you do here?
DECISION POINT: In a live $1-2 game, your Early Position raise with K♠K♥ gets called by Hijack and Cutoff. You c-bet the 7♥8♥4♠ flop and get called by both players. After checking the 3♣ turn, Hijack bets, Cutoff folds, and action is back on you. What do you do here?
PRO ANSWER: This particular flop structure is very bad for us when we raise in EP and get two callers in LP. Even though we have reasonable equity with our range, this flop greatly benefits the in position players more than the out of position players.
They have a distinct nut advantage, as we probably don't have all combos of nutted hands like 56s, 78s, etc in our opening range. This makes it harder to realize our equity OOP on this flop. For those reasons we could often check with our range on the flop or if we do bet, we should bet small.
After our opponent bets on the Turn we should usually just call. Check-raising with this hand is fine some percentage of the time, but generally we should check-call when Villain chooses to bet into 2 people.
Continued below...
If we do check-raise, we are committed to the hand. We shouldn't check-raise then fold, since we give up our hand's equity and we are now getting pretty compelling odds to call the rest off. If we plan to fold to a reraise, then we shouldn't check-raise with this hand.
However, we should generally just take a more bluff catching line and call the $50 instead.
Calling is the best play.
How would you play it?
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