DECISION POINT: You are 9-handed in a live $1/$2 cash game where most of the stacks are around $200 with a few players who have lost $20-$60 and haven’t topped up their stacks. An Early Position player, who opens frequently for the minimum, raises to $4 and the MP1 player and Button both call. You reraise to $20 from the Small Blind with 9♣9♦, the Big Blind folds. The original UTG raiser moves all-in for $134 and it folds to you.

Action is on you, what do you do here?

PRO ANSWER: We are 9-handed in at $1/$2 cash game table. Most of the stacks are around $200 but there are a few who have lost $20-$60 and haven’t topped up. We are dealt 9c9d in the Small Blind and action opens on UTG who minimum raises to $4. This player has been opening frequently from all positions at the table using this smaller sizing. Both MP1 and the Button call and action is on us.

Typically this would be a great spot for us to call. We only have the Big Blind behind us left to act and it’s a multi-way pot where we can call ~1.5% of our stack to try to hit a set and hopefully win a big pot. Calling in this spot would still be a very viable option, but with our read that the UTG player is splashing around, it presents a great squeeze opportunity to potentially pick up $15 while only risking $20-$25 on a reraise.

We also sometimes isolate a player with a potentially weak range which isn’t the worst outcome for us either. When raising multiple opponents we default to raise of 3x the initial raise amount then add in the additional call amount for each caller (so $12 + $4 + $4). When out of position it is often preferred to raise a little larger sizing to account for being OOP postflop, however with the stack depths here $20 is reasonable and that is what we raise to in game.

The Big Blind folds and the UTG player moves all-in! Everyone else folds and action is on us. We have to call $114 to win $164 so we need roughly 41% equity to call. In this spot it’s important to follow process, even though we’ve seen the UTG player play very loose.

One mistake players often make is that because they see opponents splashing around a fair amount they assume that player will be loose in all situations. While UTG likely opens quite looser than the default hand ranges on average, they are quite unlikely to be shoving very wide in this situation unless we’ve observed that specific play before.

A typical range for this player might be something like JJ+/AK which gives us around 33% equity. If we want to assume a range slightly wider such as TT+/AQ+ we get closer to 37% equity. We would need UTG to be capable of raising hands like A5s/A4s to introduce a bluffing range, and even then we are 40.5% equity vs TT+/AQ+/A5s/A4s. We would need them to have ALL the suited wheel aces here to get over 41%, in which case it would be 43%.

In most low stakes games players play even tighter than the ranges we are assigning to UTG in this scenario. If we had a read that our opponent could be moving in with lower pairs than ours, or stone cold bluffing with a higher than normal frequency we could call, but without this knowledge this is a pretty clear fold.

Folding is the best play.