DECISION POINT: In a six-handed online $5/$10 cash game action folds to you in the Hijack and you raise to $22 with A♠8♥. The Cutoff folds, the Button calls, and both Blinds fold. The flop comes A♣3♠6♠ and action is on you. What do you do here?

PRO ANSWER: We are playing a mid to high stakes cash game online with $5/$10 blinds and 6 players at the table. We are fairly new to the game with no significant reads and dealt As8h in middle position. The table has a very low standard opening raise size, 2.2BBs in this case.

The MP2 player folds and action is on us. A8o is at the very bottom of our opening range with this standard opening raise size. In fact it’s often a mixed strategy where we raise 75% of the time and fold 25% of the time based on a randomizer. In this case we open to $22 and it folds to the Button who flat calls and everyone else folds.

The flop is Ac3s6s and action is on us. The effective stack is $328 since the Button’s stack is shorter than ours, making this a spot where the stack to pot ratio (SPR) is around 5.5. This is a flop that favors our range where we will often be continuation betting, but there are a lot of 77-KK hands that prefer to check/call in this spot.

One thing we can do to protect those hands is take some of our weakest top pair holdings, particularly those that get trickier to play as the pot bloats out of position, and put them into our checking range for balance. If we can sometimes have Ax here when we check it becomes difficult for our opponent to just fire away and put really good second pair hands.

If the effective stacks were 100BBs to start we could make a more compelling case for betting here, as the backdoor nut flush draw gives us some turn/river cards we’re happy to build a big pot with.

However, with these stack sizes we benefit more from inducing bluffs and protecting the second pair part of our range rather than building a big pot while out of position with one of the weakest hands in our opening range.

Checking is the best play.