DECISION POINT: You are in a live $5/$10 cash game with most stacks at around $1,000 (100BBs). It folds to you in the Cutoff with 8♣8♥ and you make the table standard raise to $30. The Button, who is a very tough player, raises to $90 and you call. You check the 6♣2♦2♣ flop, your opponent bets $100 and action is back on you.

What do you do here?

PRO ANSWER: We are playing a live $5/$10 cash game with a very tough player seated to our immediate left. Most of the stacks are around $1,000 so we’re playing with 100 big blind effective stacks.

Action folds around to us in the Cutoff with 8c8h, we make a standard open to $30 and the Button to our immediate left reraises to $90. A good, aggressive Button player should be reraising us with around 14% of hands versus a Cutoff open. This range includes hands we are way behind preflop such as the large over pairs, but also includes a lot of overcards, Axs, and some suited connectors.

Reraising in this spot would likely fold all the hands we have significant equity against and force the Button to only continue with the hands that dominate our range. Given those considerations this is a good spot for us to call to keep our opponent’s range wide and try and navigate profitably postflop.

The flop is 6c2d2c and is one of the better flops for us that doesn’t contain an 8. Even though the flop is great for our specific hand, the best approach is to check with our entire range. The Button still has a range advantage over us and will likely continuation bet their entire range, therefore checking should allow us to get the most value in the long run. We check and the Button bets $100, or around half the pot.

Our opponent is a very tough player, so they likely recognize this as an appropriate spot to continue with nearly their entire range. In fact, when we analyze this spot in a solver, the Button is supposed to bet 81% of their combinations on this flop. We are still well ahead of their overall range and although our hand does benefit from protection against a skilled and aggressive player we benefit more from keeping our opponent’s range wide.

Note that if the Button were much tighter and only raised premium hands as many low stakes players do, we would look to play speculatively and flop a set. In this scenario we are against a good, aggressive player and we need to construct a range that can continue facing aggression on this flop. Pocket eights falls firmly into that category.

Calling is the best play.