if your donking to push people off hands on 4th and 5th street consider the following:
1) you yourself state that donking over inflates the pot making bluffs expensive because most occasions you either have to fold to a raise or face a tough decision on a turn where you have been smoth called before
2) if you inflate the pot then surley the fold equity diminishes on 4th and more so on 5th accordingly, so the ev chances of running profitable bluffs are therfore less likely
3) betting with medium strength hands possibly results in folding out hands we beat which we otherwise would have induced a bluff/continuation from
i dont want to sound like i am poo-pooing the idea but i just prefer donking on the following occasions rather than running elaborate and expensive bluffs:
1) to thin fields and isolate players in multi-way pots
2) to vary play as opposed to 3bet preflop versus steal attempt
3) to mix play up with very strong made hands
4) to price players out of cheap draws on active flops with made hand
1. it makes it expensive for the person in position to raise..if you choose the right player style eg- the pot control type
you maybe surprised how many times you can pull this move off [but dont make it a habit
] please look at threads on 2+2 and blonde to see how many fold.[dont forget if we are very sick puppies and we are 2bet on the flop then a 3bet bluff is still an option]
2.i believe that when they just call to ""
re-evaluate"" 4th street then actually our fold equity increases if we are prepared to keep firing bullets.
3.do we want to try and get value oop with a medium strength hand? besides oop if you had a medium strength hand i"d say it would be a big mistake to not bet it the majority of the time. [all situational,board,opponent dependent of course,as they say ""never discount anything in poker""]
3) to mix play up with very strong made hands
totally agree,especially in cash games or early stages of deep stack mtts.
Poker is not a game of hands, but a game of situations,like in the camels hand,i"m pretty certain basebaldy had air or an over pair that he turned into a bluff.
I"ll leave you with this to ponder over,i tend to keep copies of articles that make me think/or are thought provoking,it actually helped a friend of mine so hopefully it might ""switch a light on"" for someone on APAT.
The problem is that playing more hands for the sake of playing more hands is just going to put you into tough situations with weaker hands. You must be playing more hands with a purpose. One of the more classic examples I try to give to show some of my students how to "flip the switch" and think differently involves them having pocket fours in the big blind with a button raiser. If you have 4,000 chip stacks, and 50/100 blinds and the button raises to 300 and it is folded to you in the big blind, should you call? If you've read this far I'm sure you know the answer is "it depends." If your only goal in calling with 4-4 from the big blind there is to flop a four and get paid, well you're probably actually losing money making that call. You're only going to flop the four one time in eight, and since your opponent is raising on the button his hand range is probably much wider than normal meaning it's much less likely that he's going to have a strong enough hand to pay you off with when you hit your set. A lot of my students are amazed when I have them look back on their small and mid pocket pair play out of the blinds with thirty to fifty big blinds that they actually show a pretty big loss with those hands.
The next thing they usually think is, "I should be folding pocket fours from the big blind then in these situations, right?" My response is always, "If you only can win the pot when you flop a four then yes, you should." This usually leaves them scratching their heads for a few moments. After all, they wanted me to help teach them how to play looser not tighter! After a few moments I will usually continue, "But if you can win the hand even a small percentage of the time without flopping a four, you can play this hand. If you even check-raise bluff something like one time in twelve on particularly unfavorable flops, even though it won't always work, if you're selective enough suddenly you win the hand the one time in eight that you flop a set and the one time in twelve you decide to bluff. So instead of winning the hand roughly twelve percent of the time you can win it closer to twenty percent of the time."
The idea is that you can turn a lot of marginal or even slightly unprofitable spots into profitable ones if you can simply win the hand a small percentage (often less than ten percent) of the time when you don't hit a hand You can often even win the hand more often if you start to recognize specific tendencies in your opponent. Maybe a particular opponent continuation bets far too often. Well then you could start playing a much wider variety of hands versus him and then either bluff raise or float some of his continuation bets in addition to the times when you hit hands. If you can start to win hands with other methods other than showing down the best hand it opens up a lot of avenues to win the pot. People often overestimate how often they need to do this too. It doesn't have to be something you do super often, if you can mix it in so you're winning hands just five to ten percent of the time when you miss, it can add tons to your bottom line.
Admittedly, your plays will not always work. Sometimes they will backfire. However, if you choose your spots well, and have a solid image to go along with it, you can start to mix things up with a few more hands, utilizing other methods at your disposal to win pots that would have otherwise eluded you. Often the difference between a good player and a great player is that the great player knows how to go and get the chips no one else wants. Once you start to think about poker situationally and just start to lightly sprinkle in new ways to win pots, you would be surprised at how many avenues open up to you. Particularly if you can pay attention to your opponents' weaknesses and habits and use those as a way to open up your game and show additional profit!
