(loud whooshing)
(dinging)
- Hey everyone, this is Uri Peleg,
and this is part two of my
donk betting video series.
Now in part one,
we went over what to do
against two different player types
who are donk betting against you.
If someone straightforward donk bets,
the way you win money
is by not putting a lot of
money in when he donk bets,
but when he checks,
attacking him mercilessly.
If someone who's more
bluffy and aggressive
donk bets into you, the way you win money
is by having a hand and not folding,
and, you know, picking up all the money
that he's throwing away.
But, what do you do when
you're facing someone
who's more dangerous
and more unpredictable?
That's going to be the
subject of this video.
What do you do,
when you don't know
anything about your opponent
or his tendencies,
and he just donk bets into you.
- Heart, heart.
All in.
- Call?
- Four.
- You have a four?
- [Tony] Of course.
- [Uri] You have a four?
- I have a four. I'm the best.
What do you think I play with?
Give me the money.
Bring him a million.
- In order to understand what's going on,
I'm going to let you guys look with me
at the Piosolver sim,
and we'll ask the solver,
"Would you donk bet in this situation?"
So, for solver sims, you
always have to input ranges.
I put kind of a GTO range
for Jungle Man and uh,
we'll call it,
"I want to be the boss of the table"
range for Tony,
who's playing a bit wider than he should,
something like this.
And, uh,
when you look at the results,
we can see very clearly that there is just
literally no donk betting.
Solver doesn't like to
do it with any hand,
and if we look at the strategy comparison
with Tony's sides, for example,
we can see that every
single hand in the range
has a higher EV checking
than it does betting.
So, there exists a strategy
that the solver has found,
that makes it just bad for the other guy
to donk bet.
So how is this possible?
Surely either donking a
good hand should work,
or donking a bluff should work.
How can they both not work?
The answer to that question
lies in understanding
that it's not about
preventing the donk bet
from making money,
it's fine that the donk bet makes money.
Especially if he has trips,
how can you stop him from making money?
What you need to make sure
is that donk betting is worse
than his alternative option
which is checking.
And once we realize
this is what we're looking for,
we can quickly see in Piosolver
that when someone donk
bets like Tony G did,
the reaction is
to just play more or less,
as though the guy had C bet into you.
So now, we're calling pairs,
we're calling over cards
with a backdoor flush draw,
calling good A sized,
mixing and some bluff raises
and some value raises.
And you know, just playing
our range reasonably
not doing anything special,
but definitely not giving up.
And playing your range in this way,
will prevent the other
guy from making money
by donk bet bluffing,
which uh,
you know, alternatively,
he could have checked.
Sometimes you check back, he
gets to realize that quickly.
So definitely, if you're
defending appropriately,
donk bet bluffing is
going to lose him money.
What about donk betting for value?
All we need to make sure
is that when the guy checks,
we are betting aggressively.
So when he donk bets,
we react aggressively.
We call a lot, we raise our bet.
When he checks, we're gonna put in a bet
at a high frequency and
he would have gotten
to check raise us and get even more money,
had he checked his good hands.
So by making sure that
we're doing these two,
actually fairly simple things.
So when the guy donk bets,
you treat it as a C bet.
When the guy checks,
you just C bet a lot.
So these are,
you know, not very
complicated things to do.
You've taken care of everything,
the guy is now losing money donk betting,
and we're happy about this situation.
Now, I want to finish off by saying that
in my eyes, that's not all there is to it.
We could stop here and say, you know,
donk betting is bad,
we now understand what to do
and hopefully you guys
do understand what to do
when someone donk bets against you.
But if we go back,
and we compare the EV
between, for example,
donk betting small and checking.
Here the pot is $54,
and we can see that
there are a lot of hands
where the EV difference
relative to the pot size
is not that large.
So, donk betting is worse EV
against a perfect opponent,
but it's not a large mistake.
And when you donk bet
you certainly put the
other guy off balance.
He doesn't know exactly what he's doing,
not everyone has experience
in these situations,
and I would go so far as to say
I don't think it's bad to donk bet,
there are some situations
where it can be really good.
And if you look at Tony G, for example,
Tony G has the image of
an aggressive player,
but he's donk betting good hands.
So, he's kind of reversing things,
and this can easily trip you up
if you're not into like,
playing every hand exactly like a solver,
but you think you have
an edge against Tony
because he's aggressive
and he's donk betting,
so you start playing back at him too much.
No there are ways to use image
and donk betting together
to create favorable situations.
And even though it's theoretically wrong,
a lot of my approach is saying,
"I don't care that something
is theoretically wrong
"against a perfect opponent,
"I want to see what mistakes
it can induce from people
"and how to use it to my advantage."
I'll show you guys some examples
of this in the next video.
See you then.
