When to donk bet

Barry Carter uses the aggregated reports section of GTO Wizard to give a useful lesson on when the best time to lead into a preflop raiser might be.

My favourite feature on GTO Wizard may be the aggregated reports. Here, you can see the most common actions for a range on every possible board type. You can currently see aggregated reports for flop and turn. 

It's a much more holistic way to study the game because it gets you thinking about your actions in many different scenarios, not just the hand you wanted to study. 

To give you an example of what I am talking about, I got a lot of value from these reports when I was learning about donk betting (ie. leading into the raiser on the previous street). When you take a spot like UTG vs BB, single raised pot, almost all the time, the BB checks the flop.

This is because UTG usually has range advantage, they have a much stronger range, the preflop defender has a very wide range. Leading into a strong range when you are capped is a bad idea. 

However, there are flops where the BB should lead into the raiser, and a quick look at the aggregated reports shows you which ones they are. 

As you can see there is a very clear trend here. All the boards are coordinated middle cards like 654 or 876. No high cards, no paired boards etc.

To find out why these make for good donk lead boards, let's look at the two ranges; this is for a 654 flop. 

UTG still has range advantage here; they have fewer misses, all the overpairs and all the sets. However, it is close; they only have a 51.1% advantage. 

The BB misses this board often, but they have all the nutted hands, including ones UTG does not. The BB has all the sets like UTG, but also has all the straights and two-pair combos, which UTG does not. They also have lots of powerful combo draw hands like 67 that could turn any 6, 7, 8, 3 or club (for a backdoor flush draw) to make a very strong hand. These are boards where the BB is not capped; if anything, UTG is. 

This is just one example of how useful the aggregated reports are at GTOWizard. I also use them to work out what my bet sizing should be on different board textures, something I may write about in the near future. 

What is GTOWizard?

GTO Wizard is an advanced GTO trainer that shows you how to play against a perfect opponent. 

You can play full hands from preflop to river to learn anything and everything you need to know to make your game harder to exploit. 

The interface is designed with learning in mind, with custom filters to drill down on important information, dynamic training modes to fine-tune spots, and advanced AI to do your own solves. 

You can also upload your hand histories to get your own GTO score and discover where you need to improve. GTO Wizard also has some of the best free strategy content available anywhere in poker. 

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