i'm not sure what he says in the video, but...

first, a 1/4 pot donk doesn't increase the amount pressure he's able to apply much at all.  i believe many turn and river solutions involve small donkbets like this even with an overall range disadvantage.  (although you'd probably never donk your whole range with a range disadvantage)

second, the 3 improves a portion of our range to the near nuts which allows us to defend well vs. someone raising and applying tons of pressure, so we don't mind increasing the pot size so much.  you seem to be glossing over this fact when you mention that we don't have strong top pairs in our range... we're protected by trips, and often wouldn't raise K7/K3/73 on the flop anyway.  that's why the 3 is a much better card to donk than the 2, although donking the 2 still makes some sense to me

third, the 3 is also good in the sense that we're probably calling some top x% of hands on the flop, and he's probably cbetting some range that is at least somewhat polarized, and the 3 misses a large portion of the somewhat polarized range which by default helps the top x% of hands guy

^these last two points are what make donking our whole range probably ok

It's important to realize that villain can't do anything against a 1/4 pot donk that he isn't able to do against a check when we haven't split our range. We're not allowing him to do anything different, and we're preventing him from seeing the river for free (at a small cost). This is why we have to do this play in spots where our range is quite strong, or else we lose our bet too often to justify the decision. 

yeah I was thinking the same why donk 1/4 pot and not 1/2 or 1/3

should IP player have raise range on this turn? I guess he should just because his bet is so small, how about if SB starts donking 3/4 pot or overbetting, should IP player just call or create raise range aswell?

So the boardpair gives us near nutted hands sometimes that our opponent doenst have often, and also removes some of the blufcatcher hands out of our range, so it polarizes our range more. Now if we would check our whole range to him IP would check behind most of the time as he now doesnt have much hands that can valuebet all three streets. 

So one idea is to bet big with our trips for value and with some of the weakest hand in our range, and checkcall the rest. This is good for our trips as we get more value this way. Its worse for our blufcatchers as it forces IP to start valuebetting lighter on the turn. So we bet some trips and check some and somewhere in the middle we get some sort of equilibrium. I think this is a good strategy on boards like j82 when the 8 hits on the turn. IP would certainly check behind a lot of 8s so when we have the 8 we have the best hand very often so we need to bet to get value. we can also have some weak hands and draws that we can use to bluf. 

The k73 example from the video is a little bit different. Here IP wil probably cbet the flop more often with some 3x, and we flat less often preflop with 3s. So overbetting a wide range makes less sense in this situation. 

Kevins idea to bet 1/4 with whole range is interesting. It seems like the main purpose of it is to put hands with two overcards to the 7 in a tough spot. A lot of those hands won't  be able to bluf the turn so folding them out seems like a good result for our own 7x.  It also makes sense (I think?) that betting small  with your whole range when you have a small range advantage could be better than checking the whole range simply because we force some money in the pot with a equity advantage.  

Would be nice to see some quantitative arguments why/if betting 1/4 with range is better than mixing it up between checks and bigger bets. 

Checkraising also is a possibility ofcourse. Having a balanced lead, checkcall, and checkraiserange seems like a hard thing to do tho. I think checkraising makes most sense on a board like j74ss with the offsuit 4 hitting on the turn. On boards like that the ranges are a little bit more linear and there is more incentive for IP to bet Jx for protection. His blufs have more equity aswell so theres more incentive for us to raise to punish draws. Its also harder to lead as the IP will have a strategic advantage on a lot of rivers after he calls because our trips wont be as good anymore when draws kick in and IP can have a lot of them. 

^ a goran  a 1/4 donkbet is very close to a check so IP should play almost the same as he would play vs a check. He will fold some of his weakest hand, raise with whatever range he thinks is good enough for it and balance with blufs. Call with medium strenght hands as well as with some slowplays. Facing bigger bets OOP range is gonna be more polarized so we raise less often. We have a lot of blufcatchers and not that many nutted hands so it seems like there is a lot of value in slowplaying. The bigger villain (should) bet with his trips, the less of a raising range we need. We should have some small raising range in theory i think when villain best size is anything under geometric growth of the pot as that would assume that we have the nuts often enough that OOP cant bet superbig with trips. In that case if we would only play flat or fold OOP should bet even smaller on the river giving us a reason to raise the turn. 

Hey Kevin, i saw your last video, and i did like your donk lead when the turn came an A on minute ~33. 

Id like to know what is the bottom of your value range on that lead? Have sense to me if we put our really strong hands like 2p+ (maybe even AJ/AQ if we have a low frecq% by coldcalling those ones), and we leave plenty of our A7o type hands to keep defending our xCalling range. 

What are your thoughts about this ? 

Seems this strategy becomes less effective if IP adjusts by cbetting more A high and smaller pairs. 

If called, the river *should* play out very similarly to how the action might go if you had checked and villain checked behind. In practice that doesn't seem to be the case, though. 

this is what makes me think that we're losing value with our trips+ range by not using a more polarized turn leading range with larger sizing.  We have the option of overbetting river to try to regain some value, but even then it seems like we should be trying to build the pot more geometrically from the turn.

 The problem with leading polar is what it may do to our checking range. Finding a balanced checking and leading range (bigger sizing then quarter pot) with our whole range seems rather difficult but it probably is best albeit more difficult to implement.  I do agree that leading some hands just seems counter intuitive.

We hit a card that gave us 10-25% sets, and sets aren't folding.  Obv this only happens like 20% of the time, so villain won't have planned to have a ton of stuff on these cards.  So we don't let villain get a free one.  XC more gutters and OEs on early streets for extra EV from this line.

Also, I just want to re-iterate that in a lot of situations this play adds very little EV to our strategy, so figuring out how to play it perfectly is a big time waster imo.  There's some spots where it does really well, and those are the ones to focus on- for example if flop is A62ddc hu nlhe and OOP XC, turn is 6h, and IP's cb range contains very few 6x combos and maybe is polarized to not contain a fair amount of weaker Ax combos- in a spot like that OOP needs to leverage his A/trips frequency in some way or other and it will be a bigish mistake to check with range.  But take same flop and give IP a more linear cb range and make turn the 2h and OOP is probably making a mistake betting with range, which is why I think you guys shouldn't get super excited about this play because it's easy to misapply and when it works it only wins a little and when it loses it loses a lot.

double post