DECISION POINT: You are in the early stages of a daily tournament with 75% of the field still in play and blinds of 200/400 with a 400 big blind ante. The stacks at your table are fairly deep and the play has been loose but passive. The UTG player raises to 1,200 and both players in MP1 and Hijack call. You call from the Cutoff with 9♥8♥ as does the Big Blind. On the Q♠6♥3♥ flop the Big Blind leads out for 3,000, the UTG player raises to 12,000, MP1 and Hijack fold.

Action is on you, what do you do here?

PRO ANSWER: We are playing in a daily tournament at a local casino. It is still in the earlier stages with nearly 75% of the field remaining. Most of the players at our table have between 40-100 big blinds so we are still fairly deep. The play has been fairly loose and splashy but with lots of passive action such as calling and limping. The blinds are 200/400 with a 400 big blind ante.

We are dealt 9♥8♥ in the Cutoff. The UTG player raises to 1,200 and MP1 and the Hijack both call. This is an excellent spot for us to play our hand speculatively and make a relatively small investment (3% of our stack) to potentially win a big payoff if we hit. We call, so does the Big Blind, and everyone else folds.

The flop is Q♠6♥3♥ and we flop a flush draw. Surprisingly, the Big Blind leads into the field for 3,000 chips and the UTG player who originally opened preflop makes it 12,000. The MP1 and Hijack fold and action is back on us. One of the primary reasons we called preflop with this hand is to flop either a big hand or a big draw that can potentially stack our opponents. Many players make the mistake of failing to reassess the situation based on the flop action and only focusing on the fact that they’ve hit a big draw.

The Big Blind doesn’t need to have a super strong hand to make this play, and many opponents will lead in this multiway spot with a hand they think either could be best now like Qx hands, or something that could improve to be the best such as 54s or another flush draw similar to our hand. When the UTG opponent chooses to raise this lead with this many players left to act behind them, particularly after being the initial raiser preflop, it screams strength.

We have to call 12,000 chips into a ~21,000 pot, so we’re getting almost 2:1 odds. This would be about the right price if we were guaranteed to see two more cards, given that if all nine of our outs are clean we have around 36% equity. The Big Blind could still reraise if we decide to flat call, and even if they do decide to continue passively it is highly likely we will be facing another big bet. In this scenario we are likely to miss our flush outs on the turn around 80% of the time. It’s also likely that 9 outs is a best case scenario to begin with, as we could be up against bigger draws, sets, or even just overpairs containing a single heart that block one of our outs.

It’s always difficult to fold when connecting the exact type of flop we were looking for, but part of the reason we prefer very small initial investments (in this case, only 3% of our stack!) with speculative hands is because even when we do flop a draw, it doesn’t always result in winning the hand.

Folding is the best play.