Ace-High Flush vs. All-In Shove on a Paired Board -- Call or Fold?
DECISION POINT: You called preflop with A♥7♥ along with six opponents and the flop comes K♥J♥8♣. The big blind leads with a bet, and you and three other opponents all call. The turn is the 8♥. This time the big blind checks, a middle-position player bets, and you call.
The player on the button then moves all in. Both the big blind and MP player fold, and the action is on you...
PRO ANSWER: The first step when faced with an all-in bet is to calculate your pot odds. In this case, there is about $450 in the middle and it costs us $235 to call. This means our pot odds are a little less than 2-to-1 (450-to-235 = just over 1.9-to-1).
Given we are getting nearly 2-to-1 pot odds, our hand needs to win at showdown a little more than 33 percent of the time to show a profit.
Since the player on the button simply called preflop and on the flop, our opponent’s range of hands consists of fewer combinations of full houses or quads. Instead, the player’s range includes more trips (8xXx hands like 9x8x-suited) and lower flushes. Hands like KxKx, JxJx and 8x8x would often have raised on a previous street (preflop or flop).
This makes our ace-high flush the best hand much more often, since we currently beat all lower flushes and 8xXx hands.
Knowing how our opponent’s actions skew the player’s hand range towards worse hands, we can expect our hand to win at showdown well over half the time. This makes calling the all-in shove a very profitable play in the long term.
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