Playing an Overpair When Facing Multi-Way Action on the Flop
Today I wanted to share a multi-way hand in which I have an overpair after the flop but face a lot of action, thus making the hand trickier to play.
This hand comes from a $1,500 no-limit hold'em World Series of Poker event, and begins with me being dealt J♦J♥ under the gun.
From a stack of 67 big blinds I raised 2.5x to 750, and the player to my left called. The button who had only about 13 big blinds to begin also called as did the big blind, and the flop came 7♣5♣3♥. The big blind checked and the action was on me.
As I discuss in the video below, if I check a variety of less favorable things could happen. Thus betting seems a better option, and here I went with a medium-sized bet of 1,500 into the pot of 3,550.
It folded to the button who jammed all in for 3,250, and the big blind — a player with a similar-sized stack to mine whom I thought was probably on the tighter side — cold-called the shove.
This is a rough spot, because I do have the best hand a lot of the time but if I reraise and the big blind calls I could be in trouble.
Take a look below and see how the hand developed from there, and think about how you would play pocket jacks on a seven-high board after facing significant action.
As it turned out, I was wrong about the big blind being on the tight side. While it would have been nice to have won the hand, I can't necessarily fault my play given my opponent's range, and losing just 11 big blinds with my overpair isn't a bad result.
Jonathan Little is a professional poker player and author with over $6,900,000 in live tournament earnings. He writes a weekly educational blog and hosts a podcast at JonathanLittlePoker.com. Sign up to learn poker from Jonathan for free at PokerCoaching.com. You can follow him on Twitter @JonathanLittle.
