I'm very new to NL.

Opponent is slightly loose agressive.

PokerMind $25 NL Hold 'em
6max table, 6 handed
Hand created by PokerMind SuperConverter
View Hand in PokerMind

Stacks:
Hero (MP): $48.50
CO: $12
Button: $102
SB: $23.50
BB: $49.50
UTG: $74

PREFLOP: Hero is MP with 8:spade: 8:club:
UTG folds, Hero raises to $1.50, CO folds, Button raises to $4, 2 folds, Hero calls $2.50

FLOP: 9:diamond: 5:spade: 2:spade: (2 players, $8.35 total pot)
Hero bets $4.25

Errr. Don't open to 6x. Make a standard raise and call another raise. Your real goal with this hand is to get a good flop and cbet and win, or flop a set and win a big pot. DO NOT donkbet this flop. It's a good way to get raised by his whole range.

you can check call this flop and then fold to a turn bet, or you can c/f the flop. but yea I am going to raise this bet with almost every hand, also you guys are deep and you don't really want a big pot here.

Also you mentioned he was slightly lose aggressive, has he been three betting a lot?

I think opening to 6x every now and then isn't the worse thing. Good for mixing up the game.

In this hand, we are calling a 3 bet out of position, what hands do we beat that he 3 bets? Or do we think we are going to out play him? If so donk betting isn't going to achieve that. I think I am only ever ok calling this when his 3 bet is like 10%.

I think I fold here preflop, call rarely if I were in position if I felt the player was weak, I would be more comfortable if we had callers infront of us, giving us odds to set mine while making our post flop play more straight forward.

I don't really want to tear into an aggro when we're deep and I'm holding eights. Just me.

Title says 50, HH says 25nl?

But yeh, I check/call

Me either

Then open to 4x or 5x. 6x is far too big. This isn't live poker where you're trying to drive out a million limpers or callers. When you open to bigger amounts, you have to start cbetting more, and pots get bigger and bigger. This isn't what we're looking for.

That said, if this is 50nl not 25nl and is a converter error, I don't hate opening to 3x.

Yeah sorry. I made this in a hand builder and I typed it in wrong. This was $50NL so it was a 3X raise preflop. But interesting discussion about whether it is ok to raise 6X sometimes.

Thanks for the responses. I'm still really new to NL so I'm feeling my way through.

I would say that it's just really dumb and basically pointless without a very specific reason.

One thing that you have to be aware of OP is that when you donk bet into a PFR raiser/3-bettor, you HAVE to have a plan for what you're going to do to a raise. If you don't, you're basically just burning money and putting yourself in a position to make a mistake. Donking is a very unstandard move, so make sure that you have a very good reason for doing so and not just for the hell of it. Personally I find it easier to just check 99% of my range to a PFR raiser/3-bettor OOP because it's quite hard to find good spots for it and too balance your range(I don't like that reason, but I think it's actually valid in donk-betting scenarios). There are a lot of players who can incorporate it into their game pretty well, but I would say you would be a fair bit better of by avoiding spots like this.

Also, you're bet is too small against any half-aggro player. You look so weak that you're going to get raised by TT+ and loads of un-paired hands/draws, the problem is that you beat a fair amount of these hands, but are crushed and flipping with others, so when you get raised you really don't have much clue what to do (You should fold) and you're throwing away what equity you did have.

Check/call would be my standard here.

Agreed, raising this big forces your opponents to play correctly against you which is not what we want at all.

There are plausible exceptions though. If we're on the button and we have a guy in the blinds who will just as soon call a 6x raise as he will a 4x raise as an equity underdog then we're missing value by not opening 6x. I don't think those situations are going to come along too often though, but occasionally they do.

Exactly. If a guy will call any open, the by all means when you have a big hand you can raise more. But doing it just to 'change up' your game is not a good reason.

Hey don't shoot the messenger *points to no limit hold em theory and practice*

Haha, 99% of poker books are really terrible if you want to learn to play online 6-max at low stakes.

Very, very true.

There is way too little info to give you a good response Rubeski. If you want a ridic general answer, call pf, call flop, call turn, fold river.

If he reraised to a bigger # I would consider folding or 4betting. 8s don't play great OOP against a LAG, he's goin to make life difficult and we only like flops containing an 8. I sure don't want to felt 100bbs on random flops.

Don't try and 'mix it up' without a specific reason and/or purpose. Doing stuff just for the heck of it is bad imo.

OP, I raise normal, fold pf to the reraise, and check call flop given action. I think playing this hand oop is -EV though because unless you hit a set its going to be really easy for villain to valuetown you or blow you off your hand.

Mark

Edit: for those that like the call of the 3bet pf, its not whether or not we think our hand is the best right now that should determine if we call or not, its if we think playing the hand out will make us money. And if villain is aggro and 3betting light, then we're going to have a hard time seeing a showdown, and if he's isn't aggro and his 3bets are legit, we're behind his range.

Yeah, I don't like doing it in 3bet pots


chances are that if he bets the turn and we flat, he's going to shove the turn the vast majority of the time, so I don't like check/calling the flop unless we're calling a turn shove, in which case a CRAI on the flop would surely be better as we have fold equity. That said, I don't think he would fold a good % of the time to factor in our winning by causing him to fold, but rather we make $$ as his* calling range here definitely includes 2 overs once he's c-bet this flop (assuming he would fire if we checked to him, which he would).
Of course, that means that we can, in theory, just c/c the flop and c/c the turn shove . The decision on whether to take this line or CRAI depends on how much fold equity we think we have. Problem there is that we (the repliers to the OP) know basically nothing about the villain.
Personally, though, I'm a passive nit and just fold this flop.


Isn't this ridiculously spewy?


*You said he's loose/aggressive, so I reckon this is possible, really.