DECISION POINT: You have a $525 stack in a loose, passive $1/$2 cash game with effective stacks around $200. Holding K♠Q♣ in the Under the Gun seat you raise to $12. The UTG+1 player, Hijack, and Cutoff all call. The flop comes A♥2♠2♦ and action is on you.

What do you do here?

PRO ANSWER: We are playing a loose, passive low stakes $1/$2 cash game where most of the stacks are around $200 and we have managed to run our stack up to $525. In typical low stakes fashion the standard raise size at the table has been in the $10-$15 range (5 to 7BBs) however in spite of that large sizing we are still seeing 3 or more players to the flop followed by a lot of loose and passive action.

We are dealt KsQc Under the Gun. At a table with this frequency of players seeing the flop and the loose passive nature of play, we could actually consider making an exploitative adjustment and just folding KQo preflop to begin with, as it plays poorly out of position against multiple opponents.

We choose to stick to default and KQo is a strong enough hand for an opening raise and we do elect to raise it up to $12 and are called by UTG+1, the Hijack, and the Cutoff.

The flop is Ah2s2d and we act first. In a vacuum this is a flop that heavily favors our range as we should be the only player who has AA as well as AK/AQ, as those hands should have mostly 3-bet us preflop. We can use a bet sizing of around $20 in this spot and we don’t need to get a fold very often for it to be profitable given the wide calling ranges of our opponents.

Taking that default recommendation into consideration, the read we have on this game is that it is very loose and passive. In this type of game players are much more likely to call with Ax preflop and be sticky with those hands postflop.

In a more typical game with players who are not calling with such a high frequency preflop, this could potentially be a +EV continuation betting spot. Against the lineup we have in this hand betting just won’t work often enough to be profitable.

Checking is the best play.