DECISION POINT: You are in the middle stages of a Tournament at a tough table with blinds at 500/1,000 with a 1,000 big blind ante. Action folds to you in the Cutoff with 8♣8♥ and you make the standard raise to 2.5BBs. The Button 3-bets to 7.5BBs, both Blinds fold, and you call. The 3♦6♥7♦ flop gets checked and the turn comes 7♥. Action is on you, what do you do here?

PRO ANSWER: We are playing the middle stages of a tournament after the big blind ante has been introduced. We are at a tough table with 50BB effective stacks. We are dealt 8c8h in the Cutoff and it folds to us. Pocket eights is well within our opening hand range so we make a standard raise to 2.5BBs and the Button 3-bets to 7.5BBs. All of the other players fold and action is on us.

The Button should be 3-betting us with a very wide range of hands, and pocket 8s is high enough up in our range that if we fold this hand we are folding far too often to 3-bets, but not high enough up in our range to warrant 4-betting. The awkwardness of the stack sizes here means that any 4-bet would be pot committing for all 50BBs so our 4-betting range is pretty narrow and just consists of the very best hands in our range (such as JJ+/AK) and some mixed in bluffs. We call out of position and see a flop.

The flop is 3d6h7d. With the Button having an uncapped preflop range in addition to us having a capped range and being out of position postflop, we will by default check to the preflop raiser with our entire range. We check and our opponent checks.

The turn is the 7h. While our opponent could be sometimes slow playing a hand like 54s, the flop check caps their range as they should theoretically be 3-betting that hand a small percentage of the time preflop. This is a highly coordinated flop that hits much of our calling range so their hands such as over pairs will mostly want to bet this flop both for value and protection. Due to this factor the Button's range at this point is somewhat random and includes overcards that have six outs against us.

We likely have the best hand at this point and it definitely benefits greatly from protection. If we were against a passive player who might check back hands like 99/TT on the flop, checking and realizing our equity would be a fine play. However against tougher players who are 3-betting appropriate ranges preflop and continuation betting with the appropriate frequencies, betting around half pot here is the best play.

Betting 8.5BBs is the best play.