DECISION POINT: In a live $2/$5/$10 cash game with a $20 straddle you are the Under the Gun straddle with T♠T♣. The action folds to the Cutoff who calls, the Small Blind calls, and the player posting the $10 big blind raises to $100. You call and everyone else folds. Your opponent bets $60 on the 5♠5♥3♣ flop and you call. The turn is J♥, your opponent bets $150, and action is on you.

PRO ANSWER: We are playing in an unusual $2/$5/$10 game with a $20 straddle. Most stacks at the table are $500 but we have $1,000 and one of the players has us covered.

A good way to think about games with straddles is that the effective stacks get cut down in terms of big blinds when the straddle is in play. So even though this might technically be a $2/$5/$10 game, the $20 straddle makes most of the players start with 25 big blinds and we start with 50BBs. This means the game is going to play very shallow for the most part and stacks will often get in very quickly.

We are dealt TsTc as the $20 straddle. It folds to the Cutoff who calls, the Small Blind calls as well, and the player putting in the $10 big blind raises to $100. Since the raiser could have just called $10 getting favorable odds this is likely to be a fairly strong hand range. That being said, pocket tens is one of the top 5% of hands in poker and given we are in position on the preflop raiser we elect to call and the other two players fold.

The flop is 5s5h3c and our opponent leads out for $60. Their hand range likely consists of most big over cards and some bigger pairs. We are getting a very favorable price and their range has many more combos of big cards than big pairs in it, making this a fairly straightforward call.

The turn is the Jh and our opponent bets $150. The jack is a somewhat interesting card as it makes it less likely our opponent has pocket jacks since there are now fewer combos. It also brings up possible backdoor flush draws our Middle Position opponent to bet again on the turn. We are still getting a favorable price so it’s a matter of how often they will two barrel with hands like AK/AQ that determines how we proceed.

We are getting better than 3:1 in this spot. If our opponent has 6 combinations each of AA/KK/QQ and 3 of JJ for a total of 21 combinations, we really only need them to be able to bluff or semi-bluff 7 combinations of hands to make calling profitable.

Taking this into consideration, they aren’t too many instances where the MP1 player should logically be betting again on the turn. Unless we have some sort of read that our opponent is rarely capable of firing again here without the goods, we need to call. If we had a read that they were incapable of bluffing in this spot with reasonable frequency we could make an exploitative fold.

Calling is the best play.