DECISION POINT: ​In the middle stages of a Tournament with blinds at 500/1,000 and a 1,000 big blind ante the action folds to a Middle Position player who raises to 2.5BBs. Everyone folds to you in the Big Blind, you 3-bet to 10BBs with Q♣T♣ and the MP2 player calls. On the 6♣5♣9♦ flop you continuation bet 5.5BBs and your opponent calls. The turn is J♣ and action is 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 Middle Position player in this hand. We are dealt QcTc in the Big Blind and it folds to MP2 who opens to 2.5BBs. Action folds to us in the Big Blind and while QTs is mostly a call here, as part of a balanced strategy we want to be 3-betting with it around 25% of the time. We are randomizing using suits of the cards, and before the session we chose clubs as the suit to use as our randomizer, so we make it 10BBs and MP2 calls.

The flop is 6c5c9d. This is a fairly coordinated flop that we won’t always want to be continuation betting out of position. However, with two overcards and a flush draw our hand has a lot of equity and does benefit from folding out some random hands like A4s or 22 that have reasonable equity against us. With these shallow stacks we can often continuation bet on the lower side (around 25% of pot) with most of our continuation betting range. We bet 5.5BBs and our opponent calls.

The turn is the Jc and we hit our flush. The default for most players would be to bet when we hit our hand, but if we evaluate the situation closely there’s another line that might make sense.

Our opponent will be floating with a lot of hands on this flop, and while this particular turn card is actually good for us here, will usually be much better for our opponent’s range. Hands including TT+ and A9s/Q9s plus flush draws make up the majority of our range in this spot. The main arguments we could make against checking here would be that getting stacks in is difficult, and we could potentially allow our opponent to draw out for free with a higher club draw.

The stacks here are quite shallow so any bet after floating from MP2 is likely to be pot-committing. The MP2 player’s hand range also has a lot of backdoor diamond draws on the flop as well as non-club suited combos such as A7s/A8s that have zero equity against us. They may bluff if we check but will almost certainly fold if we bet again.

Our opponent’s hand range also has very few offsuit hands with Ax or Kx that they just call our 3-bet with preflop, so the dangers of them having a dry Ac/Kc that could draw out on us on the river are quite low.

Even though the turn is of the best cards in the entire deck for us, with these shallow stacks and our opponent’s wide range at this point in the hand, playing our hand a bit slow and tricky makes a lot of sense.

Checking is the best play.