I think that calling the X/R on the turn is defensible, although I do prefer folding. His raise is relatively small at 45% so you’re getting a decent price, but that may not be enough. You will see some check-raise turn bluffs but the majority of the field will be extremely weighted toward value when taking this line. Strong players will obviously have some bluffs here, some may even be over-bluffing (I think this line can be very profitable vs. the midstakes reg population), but you’re going to be making less (and smaller) mistakes by erring on the side of overfolding your one pair hands. Nothing wrong with getting sticky when we have a lot of evidence that someone is getting out of line, but I do mean A LOT of evidence. I will adjust in less than 50 hands against the occasional spewy fish, but I value seeing hands at showdown, weird bet sizings, and extremely frequent post-flop aggression much higher than any preflop stats.

The river is the only decision that I’m strongly against in this hand. I think it’s safe to say we aren’t beating any value hands, so we’re only happy if the villain is both over-bluffing the turn and not giving up on many rivers after doing so. I can see some hands like JT, KJ, T8 loving this turn line, but those hands block so many of our busted draws that they may decide not to bluff the river at least some of the time. The 2 is about as blank a river as I can imagine, so villain may also decide they simply can’t rep enough hands to shove. Not having a heart, a jack, or a ten in our hand does make this a slightly better bluff catcher, but I’m not convinced that is enough.

We need to be right ~ 31% of the time to break even on chipEV, but way more often considering the value of our tourney life (not to mention the ICM considerations of being down to final 3 tables of a large tourney). It’s also worth some consideration (only when our call/fold decisions are very close) that your 36bb stack still covers a few players at the table, allowing you to fight for bounties in future hands. All that being said, I’m still guilty of stubborn calls a little too often in similar situations. As P-aire mentions, ego will always mess with us if we let it and, for me at least, it’s a constant battle to separate my strategic thoughts from my more emotionally driven ones. 

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With a large enough database (ie. >500k hands) you might want to run some filters for ‘called turn raise/called turn check-raise,’ and ‘folded to turn raise/folded to turn check-raise.’ You’ll almost certainly be losing heaps in all 4 scenarios, but it may be worth comparing the bb/100 of each play. If you want to go a bit deeper you can filter for ‘hand strength = top pair good kicker OR top pair top kicker,’ and ‘hand strength = 2 pair’ to compare those numbers for each of the 4 situations. If you’re feeling really ambitious (and have a database > 1mil hands) you can go deeper down the rabbit hole and filter for some common board textures. It’s also probably worth filtering by effective stacks, but I can’t give any particular recommendations for that as I haven’t experimented with it.

When I did some deep dives into my database a while back, I was shocked by how poorly two pair was doing at showdown against this line. I was guilty of thinking “two pair is too strong to fold” on way too many rivers, so these numbers must have improved as I get better at poker, but I’m often not exactly thrilled when I’ve got two pair facing a turn check-raise.