DECISION POINT: You are down to 2 tables and in the money in a summer tournament in Las Vegas. Blinds are 5,000/10,000 with a 10,000 big blind ante and you are slightly below average stack with 25BBs. It folds to you in the UTG+1 seat and you raise to 21,000 with J♠J♣. The MP2 player, who has you covered, flat calls and everyone else folds. The flop comes Q♠8♦4♥ and action is on you.

What do you do here?

PRO ANSWER: We are down to the final two tables of a secondary event in a summer tournament series in Las Vegas. We are well in the money with 54 places being paid and 16 players remaining. The blinds are 5,000/10,000 with a 10,000 big blind ante. We have 25 big blinds and have a slightly below average stack.

The short stacked player UTG folds and action is on us with J♠J♣ in the UTG+1 seat. We have a hand that definitely falls into the first-in range from UTG+1, and we make a standard raise at this stack depth of 21,000. We get one caller from MP2 directly to our left and everyone else folds brining the flop of Q♠8♦4♥.

This is a spot where a lot of players mistakenly assume UTG+1 has a range advantage as the first-in raiser. When MP2 just flat calls our open raise with six players to act behind them, their range becomes quite narrow and highly condensed. While they are rarely supposed to show up with big pairs in this spot, MP2’s range does include a lot of suited broadway hands and some medium pocket pairs.

Analyzing this spot in a GTO Solver we can see the preflop caller actually has a nearly 55/45 equity advantage on this flop. This advantage is quite significant, especially when our opponent is in position and better able to realize their equity.

Given this difference in equity advantage we are not only supposed to check with pocket jacks in this spot, but also check with the remaining hands in our range as well. If we had a solid confirmed read that MP2 calls much wider than they should preflop, or that they are going to play extremely fit or fold postflop, we could make a case for betting as an exploitative adjustment.

However without those specific reads, betting here allows our in position opponent to apply pressure in many ways and force a decision for our tournament life. In this spot we don’t want to stack off with 16 players remaining holding only second pair with a stack to pot ratio (SPR) of just under 4.

Checking is the best play.