DECISION POINT: You are approaching the late stages of an online tournament where blinds are 700/1400 with a 100 ante. There are 25 players left and 15 get paid, with the majority of the money going to the top 3 places. An Early Position player min-raises to 2800, action folds to you in the Big Blind with 9♦T♦ and you call. The Q♠9♥4♠ flop is checked and the turn is the T♥. Action is on you, what do you do here?

PRO ANSWER: We are approaching the later stages of a major online tournament. There are 25 players left and 15 players get paid with a fairly standard payout structure with a majority of the money paid to the top 3 places. We are dealt 9♦T♦ in the Big Blind and have just under 50,000 chips at 700/1,400 blinds with a 100 chip ante.

The UTG player makes a minimum raise to 2,800 and everyone folds around to us. With the standard raise at this table being a min-raise the Under the Gun player should be using a wider range than a typical UTG opening range with deeper stacks. Risking 2,800 to potentially win 2,900, their risk vs reward is better than 1:1.

When a min-raise is enough to thin the field to 1 or 2 opponents preflop, players should be opening much wider hand ranges from every position. There are already 5,700 chips in the pot and we only have to call 1,400 more so the price we are getting is quite good here with a hand that figures to have more than enough equity to continue in this spot. We decide to call.

The flop is Q♠9♥4♠ which is both good for our hand and highly coordinated, and also contains multiple draws. As the out of position caller our default play here is to check to the raiser. We do check and the UTG player checks behind. On a very coordinated flop such as this, checking significantly caps their range.

We would expect most players to continuation bet KK/AA/AQ with these stack sizes for protection plus get value out of draws and other weaker holdings. While it’s possible the UTG player might slow play a hand like QQ some percentage of the time they are much less likely to have the strongest holdings after checking the flop.

The turn is the T♥. We turned two-pair with just over 7,000 chips in the pot and our opponent has a capped range. This is an excellent opportunity for us to fire a bet, the biggest question is what sizing we should use. Against tough opponents we prefer to attack their capped ranges with much larger bets and often more polarized ranges consisting of strong hands as well as weaker ones with significant blockers.

Two-pair definitely falls into the top portion of our range so it’s important that we bet and that we bet on the larger side. Our goal with this sizing is to set up a scenario where we can logically get stacks in on the river on most run outs.

With 28,000 effective behind and just over 7,000 in the pot, if we choose to bet full pot there would be roughly 21,000 in the middle with 21,000 effective stacks behind. This sizing is perfect to set up for a great opportunity to shove all-in on the river.

Betting full pot is the best play.