Battle of the blinds

this hand is really damn weird

generally speaking, if you think he's bluffing too much preflop, raise him back there. don't "bluff call" with very bad hands like this out of position.
postflop i don't have a clue what's going on, but on the river you don't represent anything that you did not represent on the turn - a 9 already had a straight regardless, so the river changes nothing.

anyway well, you got balls. that's generally a good trait, but it's very bad at nl2 where the folding frequencies are lower, generally speaking. the adjustment is to not slowplay, bet big with your good hands and don't do crazy bluffs

So, did I understand correctly, you have been stealing a lot and now villain decided to 3bet you so you call to show him you are not stealing with crap? First thing is that you should be stealing wide and some part of your range should fold vs a 3bet and some part should defend. It is ok to fold. This hand I would fold preflop, or if you want to play it, it might be ok as a 4bet bluff.
OTF I see no reason to donk and even less reason to call a raise. After you call his raise I think it is quite dangerous to go ahead and donk again OTT.

The hand was weirdly played and I believe it is a losing play on the long run.

Your raise first in is great........folding to the 3b pre though.....probably start defending K9s+ here vs. his 3b.....(K9s can flop huge......flush.....flush draw.....flush draw + gutter.....flop a straight.....top pair with better kicker). A5s is a for sure defend (again, flop a flush, flush draw.....flush draw + gutter.....flush draw+pair....straight......straight draw, etc etc etc.).

On the flop, not too sure about donk betting (leading) into the preflop 3 bettor. Donk betting typcially isn’t an optimal play. How would you be playing your nutted hands here? Set? Straight?

It worked out here but the standard play would be to fold preflop and if you were to call, check/folding flop.

generally speaking, if you think he's bluffing too much preflop, raise him back there. don't "bluff call" with very bad hands like this out of position.
postflop i don't have a clue what's going on, but on the river you don't represent anything that you did not represent on the turn - a 9 already had a straight regardless, so the river changes nothing.

I see what you are saying. It is a really weird hand and the only way to explain it is that all theory went out the window because my instinct told me that villain was just taking a stand against the steals. I understand now that 4betting preflop is better in that situation. However I am less brave preflop ;-)
I'll work on that, I haven't studied strategy against defending blinds yet so I'm just winging it.

Anyway, it's good to hear that these kind of moves may have a future in bigger stakes if I refine them.

About the straight, I could have been bluffing with 44 and have the 5 make my straight, or even A4s, no?

I take it that this was not a good place to bluff even though I had 13 outs on the turn? (9 clubs and all 4's). This gives me 3:1 odds to draw but I only learned to compare this to the pot odds when calling, not betting. But if I had been the first to show weakness by checking the turn, I'm pretty sure I would have lost the hand. I don't know if that counts as implied odds.

I'm probably all over the place with this stuff. :-) In reality I didn't really calculate it like that at the time. I just saw a drawy board for straights and tried to represent that. Now I'm just trying to use this example to digest the theory a bit more.

Thank you for you help!

Originally posted by la55i
OTF I see no reason to donk and even less reason to call a raise. After you call his raise I think it is quite dangerous to go ahead and donk again OTT.

The hand was weirdly played and I believe it is a losing play on the long run.

It worked out here but the standard play would be to fold preflop and if you were to call, check/folding flop.

I don't understand why donkbetting is so frowned upon. :-)
Stealing is bullying, and when someone steps up to the bully the logical approach from the bully's standpoint is to smash the rebellion, I would think? (I'm in no way a bully in real life, mind you)
If you believe that villain is putting up resistance with hands they are not really comfortable with, isn't it logical to not use the standard strategy and instead try to represent uncapped strength by taking the lead?
I imagine calling here as a cat playing with a mouse and in this hand it played out like that, villain ran out of steam and stopped raising which confirmed to me that he was feeling weak.

i realize that this is all mindgames, and I'm trying to find out if it can be ok to give this higher priority than optimal textbook strategy. I was not really playing the hand, really more the person.
All replies seem to say no, and that the only way to be a real winning player is only making +EV decisions with good hands. So I guess I have my answer and will adapt my strategy.

Thank you!

I don't understand why donkbetting is so frowned upon. :-)

1) You lose an opportunity to get some info.
2) if you have a big donking range your checking range will be more vulnerable
3) check raising often has more benefits than donking. For example we get extra value from villains bluff hands that would instantly fold vs our donk but bet vs our check.
4) many players tend to cbet a lot. We can't exploit that if we donk.
5) Your range is capped. Villain can have very strong hands here, in which case you are just donating money to him.

That is why leading OTF against the open raiser is often not the best play. There are some spots where donking is ok, but those are rare.

Stealing is bullying, and when someone steps up to the bully the logical approach from the bully's standpoint is to smash the rebellion

Or then he just had aces? This is NL2 and very big part of the player pool is just not paying attention. He might not even know you are stealing too wide. You would need a big sample with re-steal vs hero stats to know if he really started to defend more aggressively against you or if he just happens to have a good hand.

I imagine calling here as a cat playing with a mouse and in this hand it played out like that, villain ran out of steam and stopped raising which confirmed to me that he was feeling weak.

It doesn't quite work like that. You are playing psychological games with your villain and taking huge risks with these ballsy plays that usually just lose money. It can work but you should have a very good idea how your villain plays. He might not raise again OTT with overpairs, 2pair hands, low sets because you look very strong. But it doesn't mean he would be able to fold those hands vs a half pot bet OTR.

you represent a 9, and exclusively a 9.
you should never have 44 (bet/calling on a T87 flop?), similar for A4s, but you bet/called with K5 so... in any case, it doesn't matter, you are perceived as either having a 9 or not.
fortunately for you, you actually represent a 9 pretty well, at least some T9s, 99, 89s, A9s (though some look better as checks).

you didn't consider much of that, so it's more like you accidentally stumbled upon a very interesting play.
and yeah the way i'd play this (specially on nl2) is fold preflop, check/fold the flop. the way to beat these limits is to not slowplay, bet big with your good hands and don't do crazy bluffs, it's pretty easy if i may say so myself

I think that if you want to stand out you can 4b bluff here.
Just xfold the flop and move on.

Blind battles are a thing of high stakes and/or live TV-shows. In the micro's there are a zillion spot to make good money, don't bother fighting for every blind. If you steal with a bad hand and you get caught, that's fine, let it go. The next 3 steals will be succesful and you will make a profit.
This kind of play only goes well a number of times until they adjust or have a good hand and you loose more than you can steal away.

Thank you all for you help. I know what I have to work on now. With 3betting and 4betting I don't know what I'm doing. Thinking about what I represent too. And learned a lot about donking too.

But just in case I was not able to bring this across, I don't think any of my ranges would have suffered in this move, at least to me but also to the rest of table IMO, it was clear that this was really a 'battle of the blinds'. All about stealing, making a stand and making a play intended to destroy villain's resolve to put up a fight in the future except with the top of their range. And that worked. I do think I get a good feel for some players after a while and that villain's 3bet was to me without a doubt a stand against the steal. I was exploiting that knowledge.

Could we make this hypothetical and say that we know this for a fact. Would this play be ok then? Or is it still plain wrong? :-)

That is something I don't find in any lesson. There's correct play, styles you can choose from etc, but is risking a lot to 'own' a table when it works is +EV in a different way? When you think that your table image will earn you many blinds and battles afterwards?

I still don't get why you think villain decided to fight you because you steal a lot.. This opponent might not pay attention to the game and if he is 3betting for the first time our assumption should be that he has a very strong hand because normally he 3bets with a very tight range. I would understand your thinking if this villain has started 3betting you a lot. And even if villain would start defending super aggressively and starts 3betting crap against you, you don't want to take a shitty hand postflop. The correct move would be to put more pressure preflop and make him fold. Why didn't you 4bet shove here and make him fold 100% if you think he does this with a weak hand? Instead you let him see a flop and hit something good with his crappy hand and then without knowing if he 1) already had a strong hand or 2) if he hit a strong hand OTF, you decide to lead... You have to remember that when he 3bets you, even if he started 3betting with a super wide range, he will still have all of the strong hands in his range also.

Could we make this hypothetical and say that we know this for a fact. Would this play be ok then? Or is it still plain wrong?

Of course if you know for a fact that villain folds, then you should absolutely do this. But what I'm saying, and what basically everyone is saying, is that we don't know that here.

is risking a lot to 'own' a table when it works is +EV in a different way?

If villain folds 100%, then playing like this is of course +EV because you expect to win every single time. But the problem is that it doesn't take long before people start thinking you are a maniac and see your bluffs. Or then you simply face a calling station (a lot of those at NL2). The problem is that if you get called you lose your stack. You need to have many successful bluffs before it makes up for one stupid loss.

We might all be wrong and you might be genius. But I doubt that. If you manage to stay on profit with this play over 100k hands, or even 20k hands, I'm surprised

Hello I had exactly the same problem as you when I started with poker. I was doing these crazy agressive plays and that is why I was a losing player for over a 3/4 of a year. And I started winning when I stopped doing this kind of plays.
For me its fold preflop. But since you decided to call according to your gut feeling (which is not good because most of the time it will tell you what your mind wants to hear ♦) then its an easy check/fold on the flop. There is not much how you can improve your hand PLUS you are OOP which is a huge disadvantage in poker.
Good luck in the future and have a nice day.

Hi all,

I hope it doesn't sound like I think I know better. I really appreciate all the feedback and I'm just the kind of person that finds a new question in every answer. For now I doubled my bankroll in 4 days even while making these weird moves sometimes but I can believe it won't stay that way (have only played 2k hands so far) so thank you again for setting me straight.

To say why I know what villain was trying to do is a 'you had to be there' thing, I would have to explain the way she 3bet before and how this was different. But let's say for arguments sake that my instinct was correct, then I now learned that the best way to proceed in that situation is to 4bet.

I was afraid to do that (would expect a 5bet, again just this feeling with this player) and am more into building up pressure instead of all-or-nothing (I hardly ever shove) and that is surely my weakness. I have to find the exact amount to 4bet or even shove as la55i suggested instead of trying to lead/donk OOP.

So I think I learned a lot, now to put it in practise. :-)

Originally posted by petshark
I now learned that the best way to proceed in that situation is to 4bet.

I believe the best is fold isnt it? I may be wrong Im open to discusion.. but personaly I would fold to his 3bet.

There will be huge upswings and huge downswings. 2k hands is really really small sample and you would really need to play hundreds of thousands of hands to see an accurate winrate. It is good that you are confident and trust your instincts. Just try to avoid overconfidence because it can hurt and make it a lot harder to deal mentally with the next inevitable downswing.

About preflop. Villains 3bet is a standard sizing and you are in positions where you should expect to see a lot of 3betting. Of course if you have seen him use different sizings with his 3bets before, then you can draw some conclusions. But you have only about 100 hands and his 3bet % is just 5% so you can't have seen many 3bets from him. And there is still one thing that doesn't make sense to me. Even if we expect that you are right and he has a bad hand here and is just trying to bully you back, then why be afraid of 5bet? At NL2 there simply are no 5bet bluffs.

But anyway, I think you got the point why most of us would play this a bit differently Posting hands and taking the feedback will improve your game a lot. So I'm waiting for the next hand from you

Originally posted by sdf256

Originally posted by petshark
I now learned that the best way to proceed in that situation is to 4bet.

I believe the best is fold isnt it? I may be wrong Im open to discusion.. but personaly I would fold to his 3bet.

Sure, it is out of my range. But f we want to play it 4bet would be the best choice. Personally I 4bet bluff some weak AXs and then K7s-KTs so I would say K5s wouldn't be terrible.
And of course if we assume that villain 3bets with a weak hand to bully us, then our reaction should be to 4bet and make him fold instead of going to the flop.