[burningyen]

I'm confused by the consensus that pre-flop is ok.

Do we really care that much about pre-flop pot odds when we're deep? That seems like the same leak that causes so many people to bleed chips by limping too much in the SB.

Do we really think our pre-flop hand strength edge over ZJ's range outweighs ZJ's positional edge post-flop? When I think about situations where I have an edge OOP, it's when:

a) My hand and the pot are both big,
b) My opponent is on a narrow range,
c) I have a pair and the conditions are right for playing for set value, or
d) My opponent is just that much worse than me.

Here, we have a modest hand* with a lot behind, our opponent can have anything, we will flop middling hands or air (and no draw) too often and we're up against ZJ. (*I agree JTs is a good hand, but I think people are overestimating its value, especially under these conditions.)

So IMHO, fold > RR > call pre-flop. If we RR to like 40k and ZJ calls, we have a good size stack to CR semibluff the flop. If he 4-bets pre (which seems more likely than usual since our image is bad), then oh well.