Pair and a Draw on the Turn, what do you do here?

Pair and a Draw on the Turn-optimized.gif

Decision Point: In a Tournament, it folds to the Hijack who calls. You raise from the Cutoff with A♠7♠ and it folds around to the Hijack who calls. The Flop comes 4♥9♠Q♠. The Hijack checks and you make a Continuation Bet. The Hijack calls. The Turn is the 7♦. The Hijack bets. Action is on you, what do you do here?

Pro Answer: After isolating our single opponent preflop, we flop a flush draw and make a Continuation Bet, which they call. The turn gives us additional equity against their range, as we now have a pair to go with our flush draw. Any 7 or A on the river gives us trips or two pair, so we have 5 additional outs against much of our opponent’s range.

Our opponent chooses to bet into us on the turn for around half the pot. This gives us pot odds of around 3-1. Since we will hit one of our 14 outs (any spade, 7 or A) around 28% of the time, calling will show a profit in the long run, even if we only ever continue after hitting those outs. Also, some of the time our opponent will check the river and we can showdown our pair.

Since calling is profitable, we should never fold to this bet.

Raising may be profitable, but only if our opponent will fold to our raise a significant portion of the time, which may not be the case. Given that both players have relatively big stacks at this tournament table, there is less incentive to inflate this pot and risk an even greater portion of our stack with a raise.

The utility of our stack tells us that we should not take unnecessary risks with our chips when we have a profitable alternative.

Calling is by far the best play.

How would you play it?
Share your answer in the comments below!



Posted on Tags