DECISION POINT: You’ve just late registered a local daily tournament with a fast structure. This is the last level of reentry and blinds are 250/500 with a 500 big blind ante. The Cutoff opens to 1,200. It folds to you in the Big Blind with 9♦8♦ and you call. You check the Q♦T♣4♦ flop. Your opponent bets 1,200, you check-raise to 4,000 and get called. The straight comes in on the J♠ turn and action is on you. What's your move here?

PRO ANSWER: We're playing a local daily tournament with a relatively fast structure. This is the last level of reentry before late registration closes. The blinds are 250/500 with a 500 big blind ante. We have 25,000 chips, having just registered and have no reads on the table.

We are dealt 9d8d in the Big Blind. Action folds around to the Cutoff who opens to 1,200 chips, and everyone else folds to us. We can mix in some preflop reraises with suited and connected hands, but the more standard play is to call, which we do here.

The flop is QdTc4d and we flop a flush draw along with the bottom end of an inside straight draw. This is a board that we connect fairly well with as the Big Blind, but still heavily favors the preflop raiser. We check and they bet 1,200 chips, or just over one third pot. We will have a lot of hands we can easily continue with here, such as pairs, flush draws, and some straight draws.

We also flop some strong hands that would love to check-raise now such as T4s/QTs/44. In order to get max value when we check-raise our stronger hands, some bluffs must be included as well for balance. The most logical bluffs come from some of our highest equity draws. Examples of those are ace and king high flush draws where the flush and our over card are often outs, as well as combo draws such as ours.

Taking those factors into consideration we decide to check-raise to 4,000 chips and the Cutoff just calls. The turn is the Js which completes our straight. Many players first instinct is to bet the turn when they hit their hand after check-raising, and often that is the correct approach. If we really step back and think about what each player’s range looks like in this situation, this Js is actually a much better card for our opponent than it is for us.

Much of their continuing range improves on this card, so it’s a card that we will want to be checking quite frequently. One way to protect our checking range so our opponent can’t just bet and take down the pot every time we check the turn, is to mix some strong hands into our checking range. Our particular hand makes a perfect candidate as it doesn’t fear giving away a free card since we have the flush draw, and we can induce bets from the Cutoff when they have hands such as AT that are likely to fold to continued aggression.

If we're up against a passive player who is unlikely to bluff appropriately when we check, then we could exploitatively continue betting. Against opponents who are finding the appropriate amount of bluffs by attacking perceived weakness, it’s very important to have some strong hands that we can check with.

Checking is the best play.