DECISION POINT: You are in a tough online tournament where blinds are 500/1000 with a 1,000 big blind ante. This tournament has a lot of solid, tough regulars but you don’t have any significant reads on your table. It folds to you in Middle Position and you raise to 2,500 with K♠K♥. Action folds to the Big Blind who calls. Your opponent checks the 9♣T♥Q♣ flop, you bet 2,000 and get called. On the 8♣ turn the Big Blind leads out 7,000 and action is on you. What do you do here?

PRO ANSWER: We are playing a tough, online tournament with a lot of solid regulars. The blinds are 500/1,000 with a 1,000 big blind ante. We don’t have any significant reads on the table. We are dealt K♠K♥ in MP2 with a 50K stack and everyone folds to us. We make a standard open to 2,500 and everyone folds to the Big Blind, who just calls. The flop is 9♣T♥Q♣ and our opponent checks.

This is an extremely coordinated flop that connects pretty well with the Big Blind’s range. If we decide to bet here there are many hands that can call us that we have significant equity against, even though we are near the top of our range.

In the event this is one of the rare occurrences where our pocket kings are not the best hand on flop, we also have the benefit of blocking several combos to the nut straight draw. It is still reasonable to c-bet in this spot, especially with a hand as strong as KK. We elect to bet 2,000, or roughly ⅓ of the pot, and the Big Blind calls.

The turn is the 8♣ which completes a potential flush draw and puts four to a straight on the board. Surprisingly our opponent leads out for 7,000 chips. At this point our hand is just a bluff catcher, and without the Kc in our hand many of our opponent’s bluff combinations have significant equity on this turn.

This is an extremely tough spot to fold an overpair. Consulting a GTO Solver we see that in fact it is a clear fold in this spot with KK. Especially given that we are playing against a tough opponent, it’s more likely their range construction is closer to a GTO solution. If we were able to confirm through shown cards that the Big Blind was capable of over-bluffing in this spot then adjusting to make an exploitative call is appropriate.

It’s never easy to fold postflop when you are dealt the second best starting hand in poker, but in this case folding our pocket kings on the turn is the correct play.

Folding is the best play.