DECISION POINT: In the early stages of a live daily tournament blinds are 100/200 with a 200 big blind ante and you are still at the 10,000 starting stack. Action folds to you in the Cutoff, you raise to 500 with A♥Q♦, and only the Button calls. On the Q♠2♥2♦ flop you c-bet 700 and get called. The turn is 5♦ and you bet 2,500 and again the Button calls. The river is the 7♣ and action is on you.

What do you do here?

PRO ANSWER: We are playing the early stages of a daily tournament with 10,000 chip starting stacks and 100/200 blinds with a 200 big blind ante. We are still at the starting stack and are dealt A♥Q♦ in the Cutoff. Everyone folds to us and we make a standard raise to 500 chips getting a single caller on the Button.

The flop is Q♠2♥2♦. In Cutoff vs Button scenarios in No-Limit Hold’em, we should be checking fairly often, even as the preflop raiser. Although we should have some strong hands to balance out our checking range, AQo is a hand we would prefer to start building a pot with now. We decide to bet 700 chips, or roughly half the pot, and the Button calls.

The turn is the 5♦ and our hand still figures to easily be best, as there are very few hand combinations containing a 2 in our opponent’s range. The ideal bet sizing on the turn should set up the possibility of getting stacks in on the river. This means we should choose a bet sizing that allows us to get all-in on the river with two roughly equivalent sized bets, in terms of their relationship to the pot size, across the turn and river. This approach is often referred to as geometric bet sizing. If we bet somewhere in the 80-85% of the pot range, we will be left with just under a pot-sized bet on the river. We decide to bet 2,500 and the Button calls.

The river is the 7♣. This is a spot where many players make the mistake of checking. If the board were such where our opponent’s range included a lot of missed draws or other hands that might bluff when checked to, then checking here could be appropriate.

However, on this super dry board our opponent is unlikely to have many bluffing hands. When they are ahead of us and we check, they are going to bet and our hand is too strong to fold. The Button is far more likely to check with hands that are behind our AQ, including several worse Qx combos that might call if we were to bet, or even some stubborn JJ/TT that just won’t believe we have a made hand.

We have one of the strongest hands in our range, and we’ve set things up perfectly for an all-in on the river. This is a great spot to follow through with our plan and move all-in.

Moving all-in is the best play.