DECISION POINT: You’re playing a local daily tournament with a table full of regulars. Action folds to a player in MP2 who often limps to see flops but plays preflop fairly straightforwardly, and they limp again. It folds to you on the Button, and you raise to 5,600 with A♣Q♦. The Small Blind, an active player who likes to splash around but plays postflop well, calls. The Big Blind folds and MP2 calls. The flop comes T♥5♠2♣ and both opponents check.

Action is on you, what's your move here?

PRO ANSWER: We are playing a local daily tournament with many familiar faces. The blinds are 800/1,600 with a 1,600 big blind ante. We recognize the player in MP2 as being a very loose player who likes to limp preflop and see flops, but tends to play relatively straightforward postflop. The Small Blind is another player who likes to splash around a lot, however they are extremely tricky postflop often trying to make up for a wide preflop calling range by winning more than their fair share of pots postflop.

We are dealt A♣Q♦ on the Button and it folds to the MP2 player who limps. Everyone else folds to us. This is a great spot for us to isolate a wide open limper while in position with a hand that figures to be well ahead of MP2’s range. The default bet size is 4,800 at this stack depth to isolate the limper, but with the splashy player in the Small Blind we elect to make it 5,800 in an attempt to shut them out of the pot. The Small Blind still decides to call and MP2 calls as well.

The flop is T♥5♠2♣ and both players check to us. It can be tough to put both our opponents on accurate ranges since we’ve observed they both can call quite wide preflop. One question that is fairly easy for us to answer is what our opponents are unlikely to have. If either MP2 or the Small Blind had big cards like AK/AQ or big pairs such as JJ+ they likely wouldn’t have just called preflop. This condenses both our opponents ranges to have a lot more small to mid pairs and middling connected and/or suited cards. Those types of hands connect very well with this board.

We could potentially go with a plan of betting here and just going with it against the tricky Small Blind who is relatively short, figuring we have more than enough equity against them and then folding if MP2 continues knowing they play straightforwardly. If this were a cash game, that might be a profitable plan. However in tournaments, ICM makes it so that the chips we win are worth less on average, than the chips we are risking. That makes betting in this spot less appealing.

If we choose to check we're going to get a lot of information on the turn. Ace high is rarely the best hand 3-ways, but any queen or ace likely gives us the best hand and any three, four, jack, or king also gives us an inside straight draw. In addition, with this configuration it is highly likely that when action checks through on the flop the Small Blind will stab with a very wide range on the turn and the player in MP2 will react very honestly with their hand. When MP2 folds to the turn lead we may often be able to continue against the Small Blind’s stabbing range. In the instances when MP2 calls we can often safely get out of the way, assuming we didn’t turn an ace or a queen or are getting proper pot odds with a draw plus overcards.

This is a dry board that can be very tempting to continuation bet into two players. With the given player configurations and tendencies however, it is unlikely to work the required amount of the time to be profitable. Additionally, checking against this specific player configuration will give us loads of additional information on the turn to make far better decisions.

Checking is the best play.