What’s Your Play? Top Pair Facing Turn Donk Results

Thanks for all the comments on What’s Your Play? Top Pair Facing Turn Donk. Sorry for the delay in getting these results up, I’ve been busy with holiday-related travel.

How to Interpret a Donk Bet

A donk bet is a way for the out of position player to guarantee that money goes into the pot on the current street. It could represent a variety of hands, for a variety of reasons:

1. A monster hand that wants to ensure that the pot grows so that stacks will be accessible on the river.

2. A bluff that wants to prevent Hero from bluffing with better and/or wants to represent a monster hand trying to access stacks on the river. This bet should be followed up sometimes but not always by a river shove. This bet may come from draws or from complete air.

3. A medium-strength hand betting for information/protection/deterring a bluff.

Of these, (3) is not generally a good reason to bet, though there are players who will make this play nonetheless. When all you can beat is a bluff, you shouldn’t want to deter bluffs, and in general you should welcome the opportunity to get closer to showdown without putting more money into the pot. Thus I’m inclined to discount this sort of hand. Hero’s hole cards as well as the pre-flop and flop action also reduce the likelihood of Villain holding hands of this sort (e.g. KTo, K5s).

Villain’s aversion to big pots also suggests that he doesn’t have this kind of hand. This bet basically lays the groundwork for getting stacks in, and we know (well, suspect), that this player doesn’t like getting stacks in with marginal hands.

The fact that Villain is somewhat passive cuts against his making any of these plays, really. Passive players just don’t bet that much, and yet here he is betting. To the extent that his passivity is relevant, it’s because it enables to show up on the turn with some strong hands that more aggressive players might have raised on an earlier street (AA, 33, AK).

Assessing Villain’s Bluffing Range

The most important question is how often Villain might be bluffing here. KQ is admittedly a good bluff-catcher in that it blocks some of Villain’s value hands, including KJ which is probably Villain’s single most likely holding. Not holding a heart and thus not blocking flush draw combinations is also a good argument for bluff-catching.

Villain’s range is not determined solely by a broad description of his playstyle, and certainly not solely by whatever read he may think he has on the Hero. There are, after all, several other players in the hand on many of the occasions when Villain puts money into the pot voluntarily. The action he faces or could potentially face will have the strongest influence on his range, with his tendencies making a difference only at the margins.

Here, Villain has called a pre-flop raise from the worst position at the table, with many players still to act behind him. Looser and more passive players will have wider ranges here than others, but virtually any poker player will have a tigher range in this situation than he would were he closing the action on the button. While I can’t say with certainty whether KJo or AA will be in his range, I am comfortable eliminating K3o and almost certainly K6s as well.

Villain faces a similar problem on the flop, where he again has the worst both relative and absolute position. He simply can’t call without a good pair or draw. A read on his looseness could tell us whether he could have Th 8h or 7d 6d, but there is just no way for him to show up with random airball hands like AJo or Td 9d. This severely limits the number of bluffing candidates available to him even if he decided on the turn that he wanted to bluff. No one is floating from out of position with two live players behind him just because Hero has a vaguely weak/bluffable image.

It’s often said that betting in a spot like this enables Villain to “set his own price” with a draw. That’s true only if Hero does not raise. If he does, then Villain has in fact set himself up to pay an even higher price, or worse to be blown off a lot of equity by a shove. That’s not to say Villain wouldn’t bet a flush draw, only that it might not be the best idea.

There are also some draws, such as the nut flush draw, that could actually have enough equity to call a shove, and that gain more than other draws from seeing the river. Villain’s inclination against big pots with marginal hands again argues against playing those hands this way.

Results

I suspect that folding such a good bluff-catcher could be exploited by a player who bets a lot of draws in this spot, and perhaps even by out of position floats, though the presence of other players in the pot protects against this latter concern. I also suspected, however, that this player wouldn’t do either of those things exploitably often, and also that he wouldn’t build the pot with worse marginal hands than mine. Thus, I folded.

The choice (against this player) is probably quite close between folding immediately or calling and then folding to a shove on any river that doesn’t improve your hand.

What About Raising?

I don’t see much point in raising. Some commenters suggested that this might cause Villain to fold slightly better hands like AK or AA. I think that’s a stretch, and if he doesn’t, then this is definitely a money losing play considering that you’re drawing slim to dead against his calling range.

A smaller raise for information is also not a good idea, because as usual you pay too high a price for that information. Even if Villain responds 100% honestly to a minimum raise, you lose an extra $500 to his value hands relative to calling. Neither folding weaker draws (which will have less than $500 in equity) nor charging another $500 to stronger draws (which will have more than 0% equity and thus lose less than $500 by calling your raise) is enough to offset that loss.

I suspect the real concern motivating this raise is not wanting to get bluffed on the river. Of course this also entails missing out on the opportunity to bluff-catch on the river. Even if you can’t exploit your opponent on the river, all you have to do to keep from losing money is have a balanced calling range. Never mind that this particular opponent might well be exploitable by folding, such that that strategy is better than raising even if an occasional bluff does get through.