I open on the BUT, only BB defends (I know little about him, generally seems loose-passivish pre, with some random spaz in him post).

Flop: KT6 rainbow.

He donks, I call.

Turn: 7 rainbow.

He donks, I call.

River: Q.

He donks .....

I was wondering what some of you you would estimate the bottom of your calling range on the river to be.

I tried to think about this from an avoiding-exploitation point of view. I could only use crude heuristics to try to come up with my answer because I am not smart enough to truly understand what is "correct". I know what i'm doing is a gross oversimplification, sorry about the face-palms I am creating in the hardcore math community. That said, I came up with an answer that I'm happy to share, just want to see if you guys could share some of your thinking about how to answer this question.

Thank you for your help/thoughts.

Prolly J6 figuring "at least I can beat some other 6x". Tbh, I might just call any 6x at the table in the moment but that is prolly excessive. I hate folding to donkers because they show dumb stuff like Ax or 33 so often.

thank you for your thoughts unguarded.

i'll hopefully get a few more, then i'll share my (definitely flawed) way of coming up with an answer, and then hopefully you or some of the other math studs can help me find a better answer.

definitely 88, and some lower stuff can always be justifiable. pretty much never calling down with ace high though because of what unguarded said.

thank you steve too.

so you guys both came up with answers in the same ballpark.

here's how i looked at it (please help me out with a better way), i know this is a shortcut but needed to try something ...

i looked at it two ways - curious if either makes more sense

1. lets say the villain here is on some sort of a bluff hoping to exploit my weakness. lets say due to my weakness sometime i fold the flop, sometimes the turn, sometimes the river. that means villain got paid off either 2.25-0.5 (when i fold flop), 3.25-1.5 (when i fold turn), or 5.25-2.5 (when i fold river) ... this on average is 9.75-4.5 so 2.16-1. this says to me that if i fold more than 31.6% of my combos i'm exploitable. (i.e. if i don't showdown 68.4% of my combos i'm exploitable)

2. or you can look at like the villain is bluffing here on the flop/turn/river as sort of a whole hand/combo bluff. so he is ready to bet 2.5BB to win either 2.25, 3.25 or 5.25 (if i fold on the flop, turn or river). this averages out to villain getting paid off 3.58-2.5. this suggests if i fold more than 41% of my combos i'm exploitable. (i.e., need to showdown 59% of my combos)

anyways, thats how i did it, curious if that makes sense to you guys as a shortcut that seems to at least closely approximate a "correct" answer to how much you need to calldown with to not be "exploitable".

Your math looks good to me. The most important thing to take away from those numbers is that the flop is the most important place to make sure you call or raise since that is when he gets by far the best odds on his bluff.

In practice, I find that donks from bad players are heavily skewed towards weak hands/draws/pure bluffs. So not a good place to play GTO imo.

You're going a long way toward getting better at LHE by running those numbers... you would be surprised how many regs do all of their math one street at a time instead of considering the whole hand.

One annoying thing... your numbers do not take into account your raises, which make a significant difference. But in trying to factor raises in, the math gets really absurd really fast.

Exercises like this are good, but the focus should always be on exploitive play as that's where the real money is.