DECISION POINT: You are early in a live six-handed $2/$5 cash game session and are dealt A♣K♥ in the Small Blind. It folds to the Button who raises to $12, you 3-bet to $48, the Big Blind folds, and the Button calls. The flop comes Q♥T♣6♠ and you bet $40. Your opponent raises to $100 and action is back on you. What do you do here?

PRO ANSWER: We are playing a 6-handed $2/$5 cash game with mostly $500 effective stacks. It is early in the session so we don’t have any reads and we’re dealt AcKh in the Small Blind. Action folds around to the Button who raises to $12.

Since we will be out of position postflop our 3-bet sizing should be larger than the default used from in position. A 3-bet sizing of 4x the opening raise size as opposed to the default 3x raise sizing is fairly standard and so we raise to $48. The Big Blind folds and the Button flat calls.

The flop is QhTc6s. Even though we didn’t flop a pair here we have two overcards and an inside straight draw and this is still a very good flop for our hand. We also have a significant range advantage as we have all the QQ/TT/AA/KK/AQ combos, and our opponent is supposed to be 4-betting most of these hands in a Button vs Blind scenario.

After analyzing this hand in a solver, the output mostly agrees with this assessment, having us range bet this board. We decide to make it $40 and our opponent raises to $100, putting us in a very tricky spot.

The Button should just have pocket sixes and QTs as their value range, and there are only 5 combinations of those hands. Even if they sometimes flat call with TT that would only leave 8 combinations. If our opponent is ever capable of bluffing here we often have the best hand and if they’re raising one-pair hands we likely have 7-10 outs and are getting 4:1 pot odds to call.

In this case we are often getting the required pot odds + implied odds to call. Moving all-in as a semi-bluff even makes sense as some of our opponent’s bluffs (like 98s) have significant equity and we are pretty happy to get them to fold here, and we also put the Buttton in a tricky position if they’re raising any Qx hands.

Calling in this spot also balances out the times we want to be moving all-in with some of our bigger hands in this spot. The solver output agrees with this assessment as well, recommending a pure mix between calling and moving all-in.

If you had any player-specific information or are aware of any population tendencies that may tip your decision to a fold, deviating in this spot may be necessary. However, it’s important to recognize folding becomes an option if you have a strong read that your opponent ONLY has sets and two-pair in this specific spot.

Moving all-in OR calling are the best plays.