Hero is Out of Position/Without the Lead/Dry Board vs Tight Player
The question as I always ask, whenever you end up out of position, is how did you end up in this spot? Against a button stealer, you should usually 3-bet with a pair of 9s.
We will assume that the big blind is a calling station and you wanted to setmine against this player. This is a legitimate reason to just call from the small blind. However, the plan went wrong and the calling station folded.
What you do depends on villain’s range. We are thinking of donk betting here. Check-calling is going to be difficult. If you check and call a c-bet, you won’t really know what to do for the rest of the hand. Donk betting is valuable here because it may get immediate folds. If it doesn’t, it may gain you the lead and provide you with a read on villain’s hand strength.
However, we need to decide the size of our donk bet. The first question to ask is, how often does villain raise first-in from the button. For some players, this can be 100%. So, let’s look at the 100% range.
We are interested in 2 questions. Firstly, how much should we bet? Secondly, should we just bet on the flop or should we bet on the flop and turn?
We want to look at the percentage of hands that will fold to different size bets.
Range 1: The 100% Range in which Weak Pairs and Backdoor Draws call a flop bet
Range 2: The 100% Range in which Weak Pairs and Backdoor Draws fold
Table 1 shows the percentage of hands that villain will fold on the flop. There are 5 columns in the table. The second column shows the percentage of hands that villain will fold if he only calls or raises with hands that are top pair or higher. The third column assumes that villain will call with pocket pairs below top pair. The fourth column assumes villain will call with pocket pairs below top pair and middle pairs. The fifth column assumes villain will call with all pairs and all backdoor draws.
Table 1. Percentage of Folds from Villain’s Ranges
The biggest jump in equity is between columns 4 and 5.
We don’t want to bet on the turn. If you bet on the turn, you will usually be betting an average bet size or a small bet on the flop. This means that you can’t be sure what villain will fold on the flop. If he does fold his weak hands on the flop, his range on the turn will consist of a lot of Kx hands. We can’t bet against that range.
Go Big on the Flop or Go Home
Even against the 10% range, we can afford to put in a pot-sized donk bet on the flop. A pot-sized bet only has to win the hand 50% of the time to break even. A player, with a 10-25% range on the button is not a big stealer. The chances are that this player will fold everything apart from top pair to a ¾ pot bet. A pot sized bet may still be best, just to make sure that he folds the pocket pairs below top pair.
Against players stealing 50 – 100% of the time, you can overbet the pot. This should encourage such a player to fold their weak pairs and backdoor draws and even, their pocket pairs below top pair.