Rivering Trip Aces on the Bubble
Today I want to review a hand that came up on the bubble of a $1,500 no-limit hold'em World Series of Poker event. It's an interesting hand, made more so thanks to it having taken place so close to the money.
With a comfortable stack of 50 big blinds, action folded to me in middle position where I was dealt A♠J♠, and as I would typically do with this hand I opened with a raise — in this case to 3,000 when the blinds were 600/1,200. The only caller was the big blind, who had me covered.
The flop came Q♦10♥8♣ and my opponent checked. Here I would often bet, although as I mention in the video below I was keeping in mind "worst case" scenarios given that we were on the bubble. I bet 3,000 and my opponent called, bringing the pot to 13,800.
The turn was the A♠ to give me top pair, and the big blind checked again. Here I could either check or bet (I go through all the arguments for both below). In this case I checked behind.
The river then brought the A♥ to give me trips, and my opponent bet 7,000. Now the question is whether I want to call or raise (I'm certainly not folding).
What would you do here? Would you play it cautiously and call, or look to get more chips in the middle? Take a look and see what I ended up choosing and how things played out, and hear my reasoning behind my river decision.
Jonathan Little is a professional poker player and author with over $7,000,000 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.
