Hi all,

Recently I've been thinking about the cardinal
rule of never betting into the pfr.

In multi-way (4+ players) I've read some stuff suggesting
that leads make sense as you don't have worry about protecting your check range, and generally this would be for value or with a big draw (this is on one of the Crush live poker public posts, too lazy to find it).

I had the thought - what about in headsup/3way pots?
Let's say board is 877r and pfr is not too crazy with his cbets, and has a high check back% on bad textures - we could lead out here with a bunch of air, top pairs, draws, and nuts to stay balanced (i.e. lead our whole continuing range)

Then we have no checkraising range, but if the pfr isnt cbetting that often, it shouldn't be a problem.

Has anyone tried a strategy like this in LLSNL and had any success? Specifically donking on textures that are bad for pfr against opponents that dont over cbet.

Any feedback is appreciated.

Thanks

From a theoretical point of view, you don't want to be structuring your ranges aggressively when you have a range disadvantage, and this is doubly true when you also have a positional disadvantage. On 877r I don't think it's obvious that that should be a better flop for you than for the PFR, but on flops like 875, say, your range advantage is probably clear enough that it would be fine to ignore the positional disadvantage and have a strategy where you mostly lead out.

From a practical point of view, everything in LLSNL tends to depend as much on your opponents as it does on theoretical poker ideas, so yeah, it can definitely be right to lead out in a lot of spots against some guys. One reason not leading out is considered a cardinal rule is that the advantage is pretty small even where it exists and building large pots from OOP is a great way to get yourself in a lot of trouble if you don't know what you're doing.

to piggyback on what chrisv said..

donking is discouraged heads up b/c usually you have the weaker range and the player in position will bet. there are situations, particularly with certain turn cards that favor the check/caller, that donking a street becomes realistic.

the bottom line is this.. in order to not donk with our top end, we want to be fairly certain that the hand will be bet that street by someone else. in heads up pots, that's fairly common when the other player has the range advantage and the initiative (almost a redundancy)... in multiway pots, that's much less certain.. donking in multiway pots is much much more warranted.

I donk in multiway pots when the preflop raiser probably wont bet

last time I donked I had 66 on at 673 two tone the pot was already $90 at 1/2 and went 6 ways

I was thinking if i bet the flop here it would setup an easy shove on the turn

I donked out for 60 got 2 calls and shoved the turn got 1 call



I wouldn't do it heads up or even 3 way

I just laugh at most of these "cardinal rules". Leading into the raiser is a good move in lots of situations.

Ya, where did this "cardinal rule" come from?/ha. It can be done in alot of different scenarios, you just have to know your villains, know your image, know ranges and hand strengths etc. If you're never donking you're actually missing out on alot of $. Open up your mind/imagination

I have zero donk bets in my game at this point and I wish I could remember the post to reference that I believe came from one of Doug Polk’s videos. The underlying reasoning if I remember right is it is impossible to balance it. Since then, if I’m in a spot I would normally think about donkbetting (the board OP gave is a perfect example), I’ll just generally go with a c/r and if called, bet all non scare turns (anything other than 3rd flush, 3rd straight, or paint). It’s a significant part of my recent increased success (as well as 3! pretty much all donk bets) as the times the pfr or other v gets too sticky is far outweighed by the number of times I take down the pot right on the flop or to my turn bet. At 1/2, no one has picked up on this yet in my player pool and it’s been effective in my early goes at 2/5 but I’ll be interested to see how the pool adjusts at that level once they’ve seen it more frequently.

If you raise pre from EP, a LP player 3bets and you flat, then you should feel free to have a donk range. Be careful, as has been mentioned, the pot could grow quickly so don’t do it if your oop game is leaky.

TL/DR
There are no cardinal rules. Everything exists in context.

I find it very easy to balance a donk leading range.

There not a lot of situations where donk betting makes sense, but certainly there are some. If you're in a situation where you'd write a HH starting with, "I have no reads," then donking is almost always a bad idea. You want to know something about the pfr and how they would react to the donk bet before doing it.

DT,

Donking out has merit in some hands but every single hand in poker is different so you can't use any rules to go by.

Let's say V raises OTB (a TAG with stats of maybe 20/15) and we call in BB HU.

Flop is 567sss

Should we lead our entire range? Do we barrel bad turns (Q+)?

And I’m not staying this as any kind of cardinal rule, simply a change adapted into my game based on a post from this board and how I’ve implemented it successfully.