DECISION POINT: You are in a loose, yet passive, live $2/$5 cash game with most stacks at $500. The short stack is just under $250, and you’ve run your stack up to $1,500. The MP1 player and Hijack limp and you raise to $25 with 9♠9♦ from the Cutoff. The Button, who is short stacked, 3-bets to $50 and it folds around to you.

What do you do here?

PRO ANSWER: We are playing a loose, live $2/$5 cash game. Most of the stacks are $500 but we’ve run ours up to over $1,500 and the player to our immediate left has just under $250. We are dealt 9s9d in the Cutoff. It folds to MP1 who limps and the Hijack also limps behind. Everyone else has folded and action is on us.

This situation comes up a lot in poker, particularly in live, low stakes games. The first step here should be to examine if we believe calling is profitable.

Looking at the calling criteria, we have a hand that could be played speculatively to flop a set, the pot is already multi-way, and calling is only around 1% of the effective stack. We will flop a set roughly one in every eight times, and when we do the average a profit is more than eight times our $5 investment when we hit.

So we know calling is profitable by default, which means we should never fold our hand. Raising remains a potential option. If the table is passive it’s quite possible raising is a more profitable option, as passive tables have lower implied odds. Raises also allow us to realize equity better in the scenarios that we don’t flop a nine and have to attempt to navigate to a showdown or get a fold postflop.

However, if the table is aggressive and/or splashy preflop and postflop calling is often preferred as we’ll have huge implied odds and if someone does raise after we limp behind calling the raise may still be profitable. In the case of raising, we have the potential to face difficult decisions versus reraises for much larger portions of our stack.

We view this table as relatively passive and decide to raise to $25 to isolate the limpers. The short stack to our left then makes it $50! Action folds back around and we have another decision to make.

If we know the Button is capable of raising a wide range here moving all-in is a consideration, but most opponents aren’t 3-betting super small in this spot with a lot of bluffs or hands that are worse than ours. Given that factor, the first step is to again evaluate if calling is profitable.

Whenever we call in this spot to try and flop a 9 we will need to win 8x our $25 call amount on average. In this situation that equates to $200 and with the money already in the pot plus what’s behind in the Button’s stack, it’s very reasonable to expect that we will win $200+ on average when we hit a set. The course of action when we don’t hit a 9 largely depends on how we view the opponent’s range.

If the Button’s range includes a lot of AJ+/KQ type combinations, then we likely have to go with our hand on many dry boards. This sometimes includes boards that contain an overcard, especially if the overcard is a J or a T. If our assessment of the Button’s range is almost all QQ+ type hands we can just fold any flop that doesn’t contain a 9.

It’s important to put our opponent on a range preflop though and decide how to proceed on different flop textures before taking a calling line preflop. That approach removes the emotion from the decision and makes it more likely that we’ll make the correct play postflop.

Calling is the best play.