Originally posted by ZakYoun270
Pre : looks fine
flop : looks good again. doesn't seem like a spot where leading makes sense, since BU has the polarity advantage. we have decent turn playability, with the backdoor diamonds and the four, and our hand does a good job of absorbing aggression.
Generally leading is an valid option for the oop player to use the (in PLO commonly occuring) texture shifts. Done correctly it allows us to deny much more Equity by adding bluffs we could not check-call becase our value range is more polarized (compared to his wide flop stabbing range). Villain would have a tough time continuing against a potentially nutted range fearing to have to call off another river barrel for showdown (leverage). We can compensate positional disadvantage by having polarity advantage (at least partially).
The preflop-flop shift is the most significant as 3 cards at once are dealt at just 1 betting round. This is a huge load of new information making donking strategies an important part of a balanced strategy on many low/dry/static/light board textures. To illustrate this I´d mention the nutted flop leading frequencies used by solver to extract value on light boards where solver start leading most of his top range despite texture, polarity, equities etc.. would actually demand 100% checking for balancing purposes. This should not be an argument for donking in this specific hand I just wanted to clearify the reasons to generally start donkig flop or turn.
turn I'm not really sure if check raise or lead is better. I guess c/c is an option too although might be too fancy. I get the impression that we're not "supposed" to donk texture changing turns in these sort of heads up oop spots, presumably because this would leave our turn checking range too vulnerable. Especially if we are just donking the nuts then villain can run us over after we check, but even if we are donking nuts + air we will just never be check raising the turn so villain can still run us over. So I guess I will opt for check raise, or maybe even check call given that we are so deep and out of position.
I´d say x/r turn can still be better because of the importance of protection and preserving our Equity weighing higher than the implied value we might get by luring villain into a river bluff barreling scenario. A player from NLHE background naturally would advocate to x/c turn x/r or x/c river. Imo this is an example for different lines where it is hard to explain why to do so by bare terms of value, protection and foldequity. Donking would be also not common in NLHE since the nutstraight would be a much smaller and static portion of our value range compared to PLO.
