Updated on 21 Feb 26 by
Barry carter
Poker Expert

How to play top pair top kicker multiway?

With the new GTO Wizard Multiway feature, we look at how much tighter 3-way pots are supposed to play.

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How do you play Top Pair, Top Kicker?

GTO Wizard has just launched 3-way pot solving, meaning the most popular tool in poker has taken its first steps into the world of post-flop multi-way solving. 

I have taken it for a spin, and there are a number of multi-way heuristics I have noticed (OK, Dara has shown me), which I will document here in the coming weeks. 

The first one is simply how much tighter we have to be in general. 

In this example, the stacks are 40bb's effective. UTG opens, the HJ calls and the SB calls. 

The flop is J♥9♦8♦.

The SB checks most of the time, and UTG checks most of the time too (which may surprise some people given they were the preflop aggressor). The HJ bets about 1/3rd of the time. 

When the HJ does bet, SB calls about 40% of the time. If you were the UTG, what do you do with AJ or KJ? 

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It actually starts to become a fold. We have a top pair top kicker type hand, we have the stronger preflop range, we make a hand we probably wanted to make preflop, and we still have to fold a lot. 

As you can see, we prefer calling with weaker hands like KTs/JTs/T8s because they have a good chance of making a straight. We'd rather call with KQ, a gutshot, than KJs. 

This highlights two lessons we have seen, so far, from multi-way solvers. First of all, we need a much stronger hand generally to put money in the pot. Secondly, improvability towards nutted hands is much more desirable than modest "best hand right now" holdings. 

What do you do with TPTK? Let us know in the comments:

Poker Expert

Barry Carter is the editor of PokerStrategy.com and the co-author of The Mental Game of Poker 1 & 2, Poker Satellite Strategy, PKO Poker Strategy, Endgame Poker Strategy, GTO Poker Simplified, Mystery Bounty Poker Strategy and Beyond GTO. In 2025, he won the Global Poker Awards for Best Book and Twitter Personality of the Year.