DECISION POINT: You are in a live $1/$3 cash game with most stacks at $300, except for you with $1000, and the Button with $800. The UTG+1 and MP1 players limp, it folds to the Button who raises to $20, and you reraise to $65 with K♦K♥. The limpers fold, the Button calls, and the flop comes J♠4♥3♥. You bet $35 and your opponent calls. The turn is K♣ and action is on you.

What do you do here?

PRO ANSWER: We are playing a low stakes live $1/$3 cash game. We have a $1000 stack and most players have around $300 with the exception of the Button having a stack close to ours at $800. We are dealt red kings in the Big Blind. The UTG+1 and MP1 players both limp and it folds to the Button who raises to $20. The Small Blind folds and action is on us.

The Button could potentially be isolating the limpers with a fairly wide range and we have the second best possible starting hand in poker, so we’re definitely going to want to put in a raise. A standard reraise is typically 3x the original raise amount. However, often when we are out of position and deep stacked, a larger raise size is preferred to put more money in the pot while we have a clear equity edge and try to make up for positional disadvantage postflop. Typically a bet size of approximately $80-$90 would be preferred but in real time we made it $65 and only the Button called.

The flop is J♠4♥3♥. In three and four bet pots the preflop raiser often has an overwhelming range advantage and because of this their continuation betting frequencies are often extremely high. A good default play in these situations is to continuation bet on the small side as your range advantage already puts a lot of pressure on your opponents in these spots and the bluffs in your range benefit greatly from the great price they are getting.

When we consult a solver pocket kings with the Kh is actually one of the hands we could check with some frequency here, although betting is still preferred 75% of the time. When we do bet, the solver prefers half pot as opposed to sizing down into the 25% pot range. In real time we use our heuristic of continuation betting frequently and small in 3-bet pots and make it $35 and the Button calls.

The turn is the K♣ and we turn the current best hand possible. This is a spot where the immediate temptation could be to slowplay our hand. After all, given the small flop bet the Button could be floating a wide range on the flop and checking would give them an opportunity to bet with a lot of hands that have almost no equity and would fold if we bet. While slowplaying may at first seem viable, there are a few key issues with taking this approach.

If we consider range interaction, the king is a much better card for our hand range than our opponent. Skilled and observant opponents will recognize we are likely to continue bluffing with strong 3-betting combos in our range such as AQo or even our preflop bluffs like A5s here and would likely slow down on the turn after we check.

Given the stacks are over 200bb effective, we also risk not getting paid off appropriately with our set. If the turn checks through when the Button has a hand they would call a bet with on turn, now it’s nearly impossible to get the rest of our stack in on the river and could cost us the opportunity to win a big pot.

If we happened to know that our opponent was floating a very wide range here and liked to stab at pots when checked to, then checking could be a fine exploitative adjustment. However, against opponents who recognize this spot as a high frequency second barrel spot, we want a balanced strategy that includes two barreling our big hands and our bluffs. The output from the solver for this spot confirms our assumption as it prefers a bet size of 50%-67% of pot.

Betting around half pot is the best play.