I want to preface this by saying that I actually think whales that do a lot of leading make it tricky to play against. I mean, we're going to miss so many flops that if they bet before we can c bet, we have to do a lot of folding. Though I have seen that (in an admittedly small sample) when I raise their leads on the flop, they tend to do a lot of folding...Is the solution to start raising their flop bets with a polarized range?

$200 effective, villain is VPIP>50%, hero is VPIP<20%.

OTTH

Hero opens HJ $5 A 4 and only villain calls in BB.

Flop ($11): 7 2 2. Villain leads $6. Hero? What's your plan going forward? I know Ojune says small with small hands, and big pots with big hands...But, it seems like we're good here often? If we just start auto folding everything that isn't a pair, don't you think we'll get exploited? I'm concerned about flatting though, because if he just auto barrels turns and rivers and we don't improve, we either over fold turn/river, or start playing huge pots with just A high? I'm confused .

Insta muck. You’ve got plenty of better stuff to call, this maybe becomes necessary to defend if villain does this with literally any two cards

But to answer your question more generally, I think it’s good to do a lot of raising here. I think a lot of donk Leads on this board are equity denials with 7x or 55 or something, and will fold under pressure

So don't you worry about overfolding, because he's donking too wide/too often? Without actually plugging this into Flopzilla, it seems like he's printing if he range donks here.

As far as your follow up - do you raise a polarized range versus these donks then?

Hes not going to be able to print doing this on every board though, but this particular one is just incredibly ugly for our hand so just raise him on a better one. Hes a whale you dont need to worry about being exploited by him when he donks a tiny little pot. I just raise these guys whenever I have any shred of equity as long as they are passive enough and wont be sticky too often and call down with bottom pairs and stuff like that. I had a dude call me down with pocket 2s in a 3bet pot with a board of AJ1097 with a flush possible...

I'm saying that they'd have to be donking very very wide to make calling Ac4c vs. this size into an equilibrium call. Donking using half pot is almost never a thing AFAIK, it's almost always very small when it's a thing


You have plenty of heart draws, backdoor diamonds, overcards with Ad, etc. your A out isn't remotely clean. I'd raise polarized

Yeah, no need to continue here imo.

Having a BDFD is preferable.

Interesting. Well, thanks for your responses. I assume the bluff portion of our raising range would be low cards with BDFD on rainbow boards, and flush draws here?