Medium pair facing two raises, NL MTT

DailyHandQuiz

Game type: $50 rebuy tournament, PokerStars
Stage of tourney: Nearing money
Your image: Aggressive
Opponent’s image: NO strong read
Your hand: 7♣7♦

The setup: You’ve got a solid stack in this $50 rebuy tournament when the following hand comes up.

A short stack in MP pushes in for a bit over 2 blinds. One player folds and then the cutoff min-re-raises to just under 6k.

The table folds to you. What’s your play?

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6 COMMENTS (Jump to comment form)

John Kugelman

That’s a sad looking isolation raise from the CO. Reads would be nice. Against a random I’m going to take it at face value as a weak isolation attempt and throw out a nice solid 4-bet with our pocket pair. That’ll give us some room to fold if the CO comes over the top of our 4-bet. While I’m not normally a fan of raise/folding, in this case I like it better than folding or flat calling.

An alternative would be to raise enough to pot commit ourselves to calling a shove. If we raised to 20K or more we’d be priced in to calling an all in. That’d be bad if facing an overpair but at least we’d not be pushed out of the pot by AK.

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Nelson

Easy fold for me. Yeah it looks like it could be a weak isolation raise, but it could also be a trap. You gotta think the cutoff’s not folding to a 4 bet – and then what – you have to play pocket 7′s out of position for the rest of the hand? No good. Your about to get the button and you’ve got a decent stack nearing the money. Let it go and pick a better spot to splash around.

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_CityBorn_

i voted call. hes giving me a good price to get in there, set mine, see if i have the best hand, etc. im not scared to play a little poker…who knows what he has….lets find out, and if we get lucky, maybe we get his stack. lucky 7s

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catcher

Color me nit but I will let this one go. If we call, bar the case we spike one of the two remaining sevens, we will have to hope for checkdown – there’s going to be 18k in the middle and unless the CO isolated with a complete crap it will be tough to get him out of the hand without us committing a substantial part of our nice stack with pair of sevens. And when going to 3-way showdown, 77 is not such a hot hand.

If we raise, we will again have to make it a pretty big one, otherwise we will end up paying a big pot OOP – which basically again means that we will need to hit the board ridiculously hard. And, if we do put in a decent rise and CO shoves over the top, what then? I would not be calling all in here for my tournament life with 77.

So, given the stack sizes and dynamics, this seems to be a perfectly sized isolation raise, regardless of whether the CO has a monster or just two face cards. Say “good bet” and throw your cards in.

FWIW, I would require a very strong hand to get involved here, AA/KK/AK.

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groundhog day

Voteds call. Would hope to flop strong or to check it down and eliminate the short stack.

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Ba donk-a-donk

Easy call. See the flop then see where we’re at or maybe we get lucky and hit the set vs his overpair…

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