DECISION POINT: ​In the mid stages of a Tournament with blinds at 500/1,000 and a 1,000 big blind ante the action folds to the Button who raises to 2.5BBs. Everyone folds to you in the Big Blind and you call with J♣5♥. You check the 5♣Q♣Q♦ flop, the Button bets 2BBs, you call. The turn is K♣ and you check-call the Button’s 7BB bet. The 8♣ comes on the river, you check, and your opponent bets 18.5BBs. Action is back on you, what do you do here?

PRO ANSWER: We are in the middle stages of a tournament after a big blind ante has been introduced. We have no history with the Button in this hand. Everyone folds to the Button who opens to 2.5BBs, the Small Blind folds and it’s up to us in the Big Blind with J5o. While this is not a premium hand by any stretch of the imagination, we’re getting better than 3:1 immediate pot odds against an opponent with a very wide range and only have to call 1.5BBs with 5BBs in the pot, so we should be defending quite wide. J5o is near the bottom of that defense range but it is a profitable call and one that we make.

The flop is 5cQcQd giving us a weak two-pair hand with a backdoor flush draw. With both players having very wide ranges we are going to be checking our entire range to the Button by default. We do check and our opponent bet 2BBs. The Button will be betting almost all of their hands here so we simply cannot fold a hand as strong as two-pair. Calling is the default play, although it is notable that the solver actually check-raises here around 35% of the time with the Jc. We decide to call though and the turn is the Kc.

The king favors our opponent’s range as they have far more AK/KK/KQ type hands than we do, so again by default we will be checking a vast majority of our range. We check and the Button bets 7BBs. With the second nut flush draw and a weak two-pair our hand is simply too strong to fold but doesn’t merit a raise. This is an extremely straightforward call versus an unknown player.

The river is the 8c. Given that we’ve taken a very passive line to this point, the fourth club on the board is likely better for our overall range than our opponent’s. We could easily have some AcXx hands that play this way, and the 8c also will be a great card to bluff on with hands in your range such as JdTd that may have called two streets here. It is fairly unlikely that we will get called by many worse hands that will take this line, with the possible exception of hands such as JxTc or AxTc.

If we put this scenario into a solver the output shows an almost perfect 50/50 mix between leading 16BBs here and checking. In the moment we decide to check and our opponent bets 18.5BBs.

This spot may be tempting to check-raise given that we have the second nut flush, however it’s still difficult to find many worse hands in the Button’s range that would be able to call here. We need to get calls from combinations such as Tx with the Tc or 9x for a check-raise to be profitable. Our opponent would easily call with every hand in their range that beats us, so while it may be tempting to shove here, calling is higher EV in the long run.

Calling is the best play.