21 Oct 2024 Intermediate This article is for medium-skilled players A-game donk bet flop overbet turn Most regs are going to check the turn and not give it a second thought. And while checking is the most frequent overall action the solver takes with the entire range, it's not what the solver does with this exact 76s. Even if a reg thought to bet the turn, they almost certainly don't size it correctly. How about you? This article analyzes a big blind spot where hero calls a raise from the button with 76 suited, the flop gets checked around, and the turn is an Ace. While the Ace can certainly hit the villain's flop check-behind range, hero arguably has an advantage in the nutted equity distribution. Which impacts probe betting and its size. Common Mistake by Advanced Players There are a lot of spots where even good advanced regs tend to make the wrong decision. Take a situation like this where you have 7-6 suited: Flop is J-5-4 rainbow, in a single raise pot, action goes check-check, turn is an ace - what are you doing here? Are you checking or are you betting? And if you do bet, for what size? Let's talk about where a lot of regs tend to go wrong in this exact spot. Preflop Strategy & Decision With 76s It's not just the turn decision, but also all the decisions leading up to it, and with that said, let's start from preflop and look at this spot. So here we're looking at a very common 6-max scenario, it folds around to the button who open raises to 2.5 big blinds, totally standard, small blind folds, and here you are in the big blind with 7-6 suited: Now do note that because we are specifically in the big blind, 3-betting with suited connectors is highly attractive. Now if you look at this spot through preflop GTO ranges, you're going to find the highest frequency action is going to be 3-bet 7-6 suited here, and depending on exactly which ranges you're looking at, you're going to typically find some mix of calling going on, usually somewhere between 20 and 40%. So it's not like 3-betting is extremely rare by any stretch, or that flatting is not supposed to happen some chunk of the time here. The strongest decision you can make here is going to be depending on information you have on your opponent. If you know your opponent is the type of person who is going to overfold against 3-bets way too often, then I wouldn't even put anything into my flatting with 7-6 suited here. It would just be all 3-bets, just take advantage of the fact that they overfold, and just make an exploitative adjustment from there. However, in this exact situation, we don't have great information on the button, and it's also a spot where a lot of players just tend to call very comfortably anyway and go forward from there. So let's run the hand going that direction, instead of making this a 3-bet pot, this will just be a single raise pot. Flop Analysis and Donk Betting Now once we make that call and close the action in preflop, the flop ends up coming jack 5-4 rainbow, not giving us a backdoor flush draw, we decide to check, and the button checks behind. Now a lot of players will just simply breeze right past the flop here, they might take a little note that the button didn't decide to c-bet here, but a lot of the time they just breeze right past it because it's very very typical and common to just check to the preflop aggressor. But this is a situation where it makes a lot of sense to at least consider donk betting and just leading into the preflop aggressor instead. Now of course there are a lot of different textures where the solver is just going to suggest that you check 100% of the time, no problems, but when we look at this specific texture, the fact that we have a lower lone high card, the jack in this spot, and a low coordination between the 4 and the 5 gives us some clues that some donk betting should be taking place even if the frequency is relatively low. Now in general, flop donking ranges tend to be very very mixed, so hands just like the ones we have here, 7-6 suited, will tend to make the cut with some frequency. And while this low frequency of donk bets barely affects the theoretical EV, exploitative players tend to be aware of the unbalancing effect a flop donk bet can have on villain. And while this low frequency of donk bets barely affects the theoretical EV, exploitative players tend to be aware of the unbalancing effect a flop donk bet can have on villain. Most opponents are far less skilled when facing a flop donk bet rather than a check, and they simply don't expect to face a flop donk bet from a regular. And as such, they're kind of out of their comfort zone as opposed to when you check to them, they expect that 100% of the time. They get a little bit unwieldy when all of a sudden you're donk betting into them and they don't really exactly know what to do, they're probably going to play against your checks much much better than when they play against your donks. Now Hero did decide to check in this situation, and most players are honestly going to check a lot in this spot, even the solver is going to check with 7-6 suited a decent chunk, the donking is just going to be a mix. Turn Action and Overbetting So with that said, let's continue on to the turn, which is the ace of clubs. Now a lot of players would correctly look at the ace on the turn and say this is definitely going to be better for the aggressor, it's going to hit more of the hands that they would check behind with on the flop, and as such, that's not great for us, and as such, it should result in a pretty low frequency of turn probe bets. But despite this, the turned ace is actually very interesting - it gives us a robust equity advantage in the nutted region, simply because we have more combinations of hands like ace jack, pocket fives, pocket fours, in some preflop GTO solvers you're even going to find some 3-deuce suited combinations in our range here. And as such, that's all much much better than the kind of hands that the villain is going to have in their range right this moment. Now the big takeaway you can get from this is that the nutted equity advantage means that we can make use of overbet sizings on the turn probe bet, even if the overall betting frequency is low. And if you take this spot and run it through a solver, what you're going to notice is that the model reveals a massive 250% pot turn prop bet used at an 11% frequency. Almost everything else is going to be played as a check. And of course, like any aggressive action the solver makes, there's going to be value hands and also a mixture of either bluffs and or semi-bluffs, and in this situation, our 7-6 suited is potentially the best draw in our range being an open-ended straight draw to the nuts. The solver is actually going to overbet this combo close to 100% frequency, which is actually pretty impressive. Now, with all that being said, you don't have to panic if in real time you wouldn't find the 250% pot bet on the turn here. That's totally okay and normal - someone who's been doing some GTO study might bet 120% pot on the turn here, which is very very reasonable, but if you look at this spot and you never see an opportunity to turn probe, if you never consider the overbetting as an option, especially when you're looking at things like nuggeted equity distribution, then I'd say you're missing something as it comes to trying to implement some GTO concepts into your actual game and understanding GTO strategies from any point of view. So instead of firing this overbet and getting your opponent to fold, you end up default checking in this situation, facing a bet that you hate life with, and probably end up checkfolding if the bet's too large. If you have any comments or questions, please don't hesitate to let me know, leave a comment. Otherwise, we'll see you back shortly with a brand new topic. In the meantime, good luck out there and happy grinding.
