This happened at a short-handed table, but it could apply to any game. There are three players involved, all sitting next to each other, and I am last to act. The first player has an average stack of $100, the next has a short stack of $16, and I have a big stack of $180. A couple hands earlier, I busted the short stack for $90 when my pocket kings held up against his pocket queens. Shorty is very aggressive and has been raising a lot pre-flop, which leads me to believe that he'll be even more aggressive as a short stack. I have no read at all on Mr. Average, except that he doesn't raise that much and seems to prefer a standard raise of 2xBB when he does.

I am dealt pocket 9s. Mr. Average raises 2xBB, making it $3 to go. Shorty re-raises to $15 (for some reason not quite going all in). Here's the first decision: call/fold/raise? I am 85% certain I have a better hand than Shorty. I put him on ace-anything or a small pocket pair. If it were just me and him, I'd of course raise him all-in. However, I have to think about Mr. Average acting after me. Will he call or raise if I call/raise here?

My initial reaction was to fold and forget my nines. I didn't want to raise because I had no read on the initial raiser. Eventually I settled on a call, which in retrospect I don't like (I should have remembered Harrington's discussion of the Sandwich Effect). My thinking was that the initial raiser would let me take out Shorty if his hand was mediocre, or he might flat call with something like AK/AQ and employ a teamwork strategy with me to take out Shorty (which is leftover tournament thinking from three SnG's yesterday, and was dumb on my part to expect).

Anyway, Mr. Average comes over the top to make it $40 to go. Shorty calls all in for a buck. Now it's $25 to me. Second decision: call/raise/fold? (This one I think was easy enough: I folded, assuming Mr. Average had big pockets, and that it was not profitable for me to chase a set of nines for that large of a raise.)

Should I have folded the nines earlier? Why or why not? Should I have called the $25 re-raise?