Handling donk bets

Donk bets are always tricky, but multi way you can't do much else than folding with only over cards.

It's depends a lot per villain how I would react to a donk bet. The last hand I would play most of the time the same as you did. Decent change villain could over play a draw.

Cheers,
SDK1987

Yeah — donks are quite polarized.
I've been wondering if I should perhaps split my donks and check/raises up a bit.

donk bets (regardless of flop or turn or river) by AI/high level players/solvers are usually done in spots where the board significantly favours the caller.

Popular flop examples: 3bet Caller gets a 678 flop where he has 66-88 and T9s while preflop 3bettor has no sets

Turn example: pairs the board, especially the middle card. KQ5Q would be a good example where the flop caller has all QX while the raiser will often check back FLop with middle pair. Therefore in order to not allow bettor to pot control, caller should lead some turns.

But in majority of examples, not having a donkbetting range can be mitigated by having an overbet range on the following street (except river)

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as for dealing with flop donkbets, I would say that the best approach is to take a balanced, wait and see approach. Deal with the donkbet the same way you would if you were the preflop caller. Different people approach donkbetting frequently and they are usually super imbalanced so you can mess with them after knowing their tendencies.

In my opinion they usually have something (it may be weak/medium/strong) but they are less likely to have pure air. So the best default play (without population reads or player-specific reads) is to just fold more vs donkbets, and cbet more when he checks (since his checking range should be weaker if he is transferring some combos to his donkbetting range).

As your reads start to develop, you can raise more or float more or fold more as you see fit.

multiway just treat donkbets as normal bets - no need to read too much into them being weak or strong.
3-way: Fold small pairs, call middle pair+ (vs 1 bet) and call top pair + (vs 1 bet and 1 call)
4-way: fold anything vs a bet except TP+ and OESD+/FD. Call gutshots vs smaller bets (1/2 pot or less) esp if you are closing the action and there is 1 bet + 1 or 2 calls.