DECISION POINT: You are in the middle stages of a daily tournament with over 50% of the field still remaining and 500/1,000 blinds with a 1,000 big blind ante. Most players at your table have 20-40BBs and you are relatively new to the table with no significant reads on your opponents. From Under the Gun you make the standard 2.2x open raise to 2,200 with J♥J♦. Players in Middle Position, Hijack, and Button all call. The flop comes 9♥8♦8♠ and action is on you.

What do you do here?

PRO ANSWER: We are playing in a daily tournament at a local casino. It is the middle stages of the tournament with just over 50% of the field remaining. Most of the players at our table have 20-40 big blinds and we are relatively new to this table with no significant reads. The blinds are 500/1,000 with a 1,000 big blind ante.

We are dealt J♥J♦ UTG and make a standard open to 2,200 chips. The player to our immediate left calls, as do the Hijack and the Button. Everyone folds and we go four ways to the flop.

The flop is 9♥8♦8♠. Playing multiway pots out of position can be extremely tricky. With a SPR (stack to pot ratio) of around 2 and holding an overpair, it’s going to be very difficult to get away from our hand without some sort of significant action from multiple players still left to act behind us. When deciding if we should c-bet or check, it is important to think of what our entire range wants to do in this spot.

The default range from UTG consists mostly of bigger overcards and overpairs, and while we do have some 77/A9s/A8s type hands as well, the overcards and overpairs will make up the majority of hands. Our opponents are much more likely to have condensed ranges that connect with this board in some way. For that reason, most of our range prefers to check in this spot.

Many players mistake checking for weakness or giving up here, and that’s simply not true. Depending on how the action unfolds behind us there are several options to continue including check-raise, check-call, or check-fold if multiple opponents go all-in before it’s back around to us. By checking, we allow our opponents to take stabs at the pot with hands they otherwise might fold to a bet, such as 66/55 or even some ace-high hands.

Our hand does benefit from protection, so if we were to lead at all in this spot, hands like JJ/TT/A9s would make the most sense. We become very easy to play against if we bet all of our made hands and check all of our misses, and our range is made up of far more overcards and misses than big hands and overpairs.

Checking is the best play.