I am finding the following type of situation occurs fairly regularly in the games I am playing.

2 people limp, I raise button, big blind and limpers call.

Flop comes A98

Player to my right donks.

I am having a difficult time trying to find a balanced strategy in this spot and wonder if this is a situation where balance should be sacrificed for the sake of value.

There are a ton of hands in my range that I think have to call but raising makes no sense. I think the only hands it makes sense to raise for value are aces or better. I don't really like raising my flop with draws because this is just going to isolate me against the one person who has shown interest in the hand. I feel like if I raise here, it really defines my hand range and allows my opponents to play better against me. I am starting to think I should just delay all my raises here until the turn.

I think 4 players in the hand is the toughest spot. With 3, I think that delaying with my whole range against most players is fine. With 5, I think I have to just jam for the immediate value. I am interested to hear other opinions on this.

They likely have KQ or 77 when they donk here

Really?!

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...5&postcount=17

Jon Locke: trolling should be reserved after 3 or 4 posters have made serious comments.

4+ players, it's not a bad idea to play completely 'honest'. Raise aces+ for immediate value; call hands with odds to call.

I'm not trolling. I'm just pointing out the thought process and possible/likely ranges that's players may have when donking this flop texture. Since nobody I know would ever donk this flop, your post was really the only data I had.

With no reads at all like on my third hand of the session, I still like raising with OESD or flush draw here. Where I play, I'll get at least one cold call (20/40) very often. Also if the hand goes to showdown, the info is very valuable at the beginning of a session.

JJ and TT are in your range. Do you fold them with no reads?

5way, only preflop aggressor is the BTN. BTN should have a sizeable checkback range, so CO should be 'donking' somewhat frequently. If we were to carve out a non-Jon-Locke donking range, I'd say mostly Aces+, some good draws, and the rare 9. With TT-KK, I would flat and reassess.

overall, playing in a balanced fashion is an important skill for a serious poker player to utilize. it's how we avoid being exploited by other good players. it's a skill that is very important in some games and in others, not so much. in a game where the situation you describe comes up often, i'm not sure balance should be your main concern. since it is something you're thinking about, think about this: if you do it right, your range will sort of balance itself out.

imo, post flop, in order to be balanced, your entire range doesn't ever really want to do anything 100% of the time. doing something with your entire range 100% of the time is an oversimplification of balanced play.

think about your range and then split it up into different action regions. a lame example i'll pull from my butt is as follows:

the range i raise after two limpers looks like this:
66+, A5s+, ATo+, K8s+, KJo+, Q9s+, J9s+, T9s, 98s, 87s

in the situation you describe vs. two limpers and two blinds facing a donk bet from the player directly to your right, i'd do something like this:

raise for value:
88, 99, AA, AJo+, A8s, A9s, AJs+, JT, QT, 89s.

call (with the intention of calling down when the board doesn't get too nasty and raising if we improve. draws we'll fold the river unimproved):
AT, A5s-A7s, KK-TT, K8+, QJ, 87, Q9s+, J9s+, T9s, 87s. (these 9x and 8x hands can be folded on the river ui depending on the board and action).

fold right away:
66, 77, KTs-KQs(no flush draw), KJo+.

raise as a bluff:
QTs.


now we naturally have hands that fall into every region and we're relatively balanced. this is just a very rough estimate of what to do with these hands based on nothing, but i'm trying to show that you don't need to think too hard about how to be balanced in this spot.

in a live 20/40 game, my guess is that you'll rarely run in to a spot where, even hu, you'll need to worry about being exploited by the other player. even where you play, where there are a lot of really good poker players in the player pool, you're just not going to be in a spot often enough where balance should be your main concern. i'm not suggesting that you never think about balance. on the contrary, i think playing as balanced as possible is a skill needed for a good player to make the leap to the higher games. it's just that getting donked into on this flop is just not something that's going to happen often when hu or 3way vs. a good player(s), when balance is more important.

i probably wouldn't raise QdTd or QcTc in a 5way pot as a bluff and maybe not QhTh either, but this example came from my butt, so who knows?

Although I like the overall idea in your post, I can't see how you can call with TT-QQ with the BB and 2 limpers behind. If you have no read on the donker, raising is clearly superior regardless of balance with these hands. If you have TT, you desperately need any J, any Q, any K to fold behind you.

BTW, this whole thing came out of your butt? Holy macaroni

I would call with TT through KK and probably show down if the guy keeps betting and blanks roll off unless I had some read that he only donked tp+ or maybe if he included trash like Jon proposed.

Thanks for the reply Rodeo. I think your ranges seem reasonable but I do not think having a few draws in your flop raising range makes it that balanced or difficult to play against. Maybe that's ok since like you said, balance isn't the most important consideration in all decisions. I don't see where you mention JTs without fd in your flop ranges.

In one of the hands that led me to thinking about this spot, I raised flop and the expert in BB check raised low turn card that put up 2nd fd. I had AK and felt like I was beat a huge amount of the time. Because I thought my flop raising range was so narrow and value oriented I thought he'd hardly ever have a bluff despite the draw heavy nature of the board. I didn't think he'd ever have a worse value hand because he'd 3! his big aces preflop. I showed down anyway of course.

There was another very similar hand later where I had AK again and decided to delay. I was the only caller and raised ace turn. I thought it was very nice to be able to do that.

i may have left some hands out of my ranges. sorry about that.

after reading your reply, it seems to me like you're trying to come up with an overall strategy based off of a very miniscule sample of two. it seems you are being result oriented.

it's going to be very difficult to come up with a balanced strategy for multiway pots with 3+ opponents. the branches of the decision tree are too vast.

how often is an expert going to be in your game? the expert is usually only going to be in the game while waiting for a higher or different game, correct? i'm assuming you play 20/40 and not higher.

the point is, do your best to play in a balanced fashion when hu or 3way with an expert in the hand. the rest of the time it may be best to forgo balance for value. you don't need to worry too much about being tough to play against when there are 3 other people in the hand with you and the expert.

I think you guys are way over-rating/ misunderstanding balance. Remember the purpose of balance is to minimize the information you give away about your hand and ultimately to constrain the set of strategies villain can use to exploit you. In a 4-way pot however, the strategies of all players are significantly constrained to play relatively "face-up" because of the high likelihood there will be a showdown.

So yeah you might mostly have to raise here for value/protection and not much bluff/sbluff. If villain is donking stupid stuff he shouldn't be, well that's bad for him, but you don't get as much out of it (if anything) as the guys with better relative position get, but that's life in a multi-way pot.

I agree with the bold, but I think any use of the word "balance" that doesn't refer to "bluffing with the correct frequency" is a misuse of the term. I just try to make the most +ev play either through exploitation or by estimating my opponent's best response considering our strategies as a whole. With this approach, I don't even need the word balance to describe my strategy. Fear is gone with the weather. So to speak.

in a 4 way raised pot, proper bluffing frequency is
A) Really high
B) Pretty low
C) unknown, but let's just guess not lot
D) unknown, but spew is quite profitable and fun

pick one or two

E) 0%

When I raise a strong draw in this spot, I'm hoping everyone calls. If everyone folds, then lol at them and hooray for me. If I happen to get it heads up on the turn, then I'll turn these draws into bluffs. It's not for balance. It's because I think it's the most +ev line considering my strategy as a whole.

Am I always going to know the most +ev play? Definitely not, but doing stuff randomly isn't the correct solution to not knowing what the most +ev play is.

Maybe I'm saying this wrong, let's say two of our opponents are arrested and dragged off by security while the flop comes. Here we are in this juicy big pot. Now we're HU so we kinda know bluffing frequency. Do we bluff often? Let's say we get to text a GTO wizard, what's he telling us?

yes i think depending on the flop texture you can have a non-zero bluffing frequency, but it should be smaller than in a "regular" HU spot because the pot is larger.

Also, the concept of "bluffing" and even "semi-bluffing" can be problematic on the flop. If you look at the GTO solution for some flops (esp in wide range spots) you'll find some "bluffs" that will make you scratch your head thinking what worse can fold, but nevertheless they are there because it is the most +EV way to play that hand and it adds structure to the raising range much like acidity and tannins add structure to a great wine.

That was my point, big pot means your bluffing frequency is pretty low. The math lines up with our rules of thumb of not bluffing a lot in multi way raised pots? Sounds like our intuition is working. My other guess is that most of us self taught humans don't bluff enough in these spots, exactly because not very often is still way more than zero. Kind of a scary board, we can rep the scary stuff, etc. If we literally never bluff, we must be missing something.

I'm not sure, it probably depends on the person, but I think it might be higher in some spots. Like if the optimal strategy is to bluff a few combos a small percentage of the time, many of us will end up being like "f*** this ****, my draws never hit, why does this always happen to me, one big pot and i'll be even for the night, I BET." far more often than we'd care to admit.

i don't care to admit.

Thx god for two+two or I wouldnt know what to do if two villains get pulled away mid hand by security!
I am a newbie to mid stakes, what does GTO mean? Thx

GTO= game theory optimal, an informal poker term for a Nash equilibrium, which is a pair of strategies (one for hero and one for villain) that

a. break even against each other.
b. If one player is sticking to his strategy, there is no different strategy the other guy can switch to that is more profitable.

Therefore if you play your GTO strategy, you will at least break even vs villain and possibly do better if he deviates from his GTO strategy. It can be proved mathematically that a GTO strategy exists for poker, but it is very hard to compute it for most cases.

If you know the answer to a simpler problem, it might lead you to understand what to do in a much more difficult to analyze spot. What's the perfect way to play on the flop vs. 4 opponents? That's a tough question. What if two of them telegraphed fold? Much easier.