Let us start with explaining the term "donk-bet" or "donking".
It describes the action of leading the flop into the preflop aggressor out of position.
In most cases this happens when you are defending your hand from the small or the big blind. And most of the other situations you have raised preflop and called a 3-bet versus someone who has to act after you on all postflop streets. The term donkbet originates from the times when no-limit holdem wasn't that popular and most of Texas Hold'em games where played as Limit Hold'em. In Limit Hold'em the preflop aggressor usually continues to pressure his opponent with a continuation bet on the flop, close to 100% of the time. That's how the term donkbetting was born. By leading into the aggressor you surrender the opportunity to check-raise and charge him twice the amount, to see the next street. While in No Limit Hold'em donk-betting doesn't have such a huge and clear drawback, it is still something I would not recommend for the vast majority of players. In today's Texas Hold'em it's all about balancing your plays and ranges, and giving away as little information as possible to your rivals. And to accomplish this, while integrating donkbets into your overall strategy is very, very hard. I'm going to skip the small complicated details, but if you start donkbetting a lot - that leaves the range with which you check very vulnerable. And it makes it very easy for the other players to exploit. If you start donkbetting your made hands on the flop that means, that every time you check, you don't have a made hand. Which in turn opens the door for the preflop aggressor to continuation bet (c-bet) every flop you checked to him, regardless of his cards. Or in an event where you both hit the flop, you give the information that you have a strong holding and the player in position can then decide to go for full value if he has a very strong made hand. Or ultimately try to keep the pot small until he improves, or just lay down and save money when he doesn't.
I started this series while teaching my father to play low stakes Texas Hold'em tournaments. I saw that many players, like him, make huge mistakes without realizing it. Donkbetting too much is one of these mistakes. I catch myself screaming "NOOO!" too many times lately, when I see his cursor sliding towards the "bet" button on the flop. Let's give you an example with one of my last hearth breaking, loud screaming moments.
In this video you see the Hero (my father) calling preflop from the big blind and donkbetting with a top pair and a weak kicker. I see little to no reason at all of doing this. We have Kh9h on a very slow board of Ks8c3h with not much going on (there are no flush or straight draws). It is a perfectly safe board for our opponent to continuation bet. By donkbetting we deny him the opportunity to c-bet with his weaker hands and bluffs. If he decides to call or raise he will probably do this with hands that have us beat, like aces, sets, or a king with a better kicker. So we just build a bigger pot out of position and if we get called - we are probably behind. What is the point of betting then? If we think about it: the Button will bet all the hands that he will call with, but will fold some of the hands that he wants to bluff with. In my book this is the definition of poor play. When we are forcing our opponent to play the hands that have us beat and lay down the hands which we beat. Especially on this kind of dry flop where if behind our opponent has only 3 outs with Ax and 2 outs with a pair in his hand. To make it even worse this weakens our checking range. If we bet our top pair than the hands we are checking are pretty weak and welcoming many bluffs from our observing rivals.
Talking about observing rivals I want to give you an example of what I mean by it. Here I will show you two hands from a tournament that my father played versus unbalanced donkbetting player. The first one is not very well played on our side, but still there is a lot of reasoning behind it. I will walk you through it. Keep in mind this hand is very important, because it leads us to some conclusions about our opponent, that allow us to exploit his strategy in the second hand we played later.
We are on the big blind with KhJh and are facing a limp from "under the gun" and a call from the small blind. Our hand is pretty strong and considering there is ante into play we decided to raise preflop. I'm not sure what hands people are limping with from early position, but it is probably a weak pair or some suited cards and occasionally a trap with a huge pair. We have the suited cards beat most of the time. We can put some pressure to the weak pairs on any kind of flop with broadway cards and usually the trappers reveal their hand strength, when someone raises preflop. We are not much concerned with the holding of the small blind. His range is close to any 2 cards, given the action. Both players call and the flop comes AsQs5h. The player from the small blind decides to donkbet the minimum and the action is on us. Back in the days I had hard time figuring out what does small donkbets mean. So I asked much more accomplished players than me how to play versus min donkbets. The answer was simpler than I've expected. "Ignore them". So we are virtually in a spot where it is checked to us. That is why we continue with our preflop strategy to attack broadway boards, since our range connects much better with them, as a preflop raiser, than our opponent's range. The small donkbet might mean a weak made hand or a flush draw. We beat all the flush draws that don't include 5 of spades and we can make some weaker pairs fold. After all, our hand still has some equity and can make the nuts on later streets if a ten hits the board. Hopefully not the ten of spades. The under the gun limper folds and the small blind calls. At this point we are pretty sure he has something and all we can beat is flush draw. The turn comes 8d. The small blind elects to donkbet once again and chooses a small size of about 25% of the pot. That is where we could have folded. But I decided to call the small bet with the nut straight draw still in play and because we still beat a small part of our opponents range, the flush draws. The river came a non flush jack that gave us a pair and we decided to call the small bet. A little bit because of pot odds and more out of curiosity. The small blind shows Q8o for a middle pair on flop and two pair on turn, and this is how we lose 40% of our tournament stack playing fancy poker. On the plus side we gathered valuable information. That this guy is donkbetting middle pair on flop and is not giving up to a raise. Also he is playing pretty weak hands preflop.
Now we have the knowledge needed to play our second hand versus the same player exploiting his unbalanced play.
In the second hand we isolate our friend with KQo, knowing that he tends to play weak hands preflop and we are well ahead of them with our holding. Everybody else folds and he calls as expected. The flop comes almost perfect for our hand Q72 rainbow (no flush draws). Our opponent checks and at this point my father was about to bet. I told him not to. What we know is that our opponent is inclined to bet any made pair on flop. We are at the top of our range and our hand is not very vulnerable. If we bet, he is almost certainly going to fold. The only card on the turn we should be afraid of is an ace. So lets give him a free card and hope he hits something, so we can extract more value out of our hand. We check and the turn comes an off-suit king, giving us top two and our friend decides to bet full pot. My father was going to raise all in and I stooped him a second time. Look at the bet size, the pot and our stack. If we just call, we can always go all in on the river, without over-betting. And by doing this we can still keep some bluffs in our opponents range, that might fold to a turn shove. The river came a blank card (8d) and we were faced with another bet. We put it all in with just a min raise that was snap-called by the other player and took the pot with top two pair versus his pair of kings, that we purposely allowed him to catch on the turn.
I hope the examples were interesting enough and able to show you how unbalanced donkbetting can ruin not just the hand in which you execute this play, but also give out useful information when you don't donkbet. I will recommend to less experienced players to stay away from donkbetting strategies all together. I myself do not donkbet in tournaments at all, except for some very rare occasions. Playing heads-up where on certain boards like 457 my perceived range defending from the big blind hits this kind of boards much stronger than my opponent's range.
Please feel free to leave a question, critique or comment bellow. Good luck and remember:
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