[bchip]

Yeah, my line here would be to check the flop, call a bet, check the turn and decide on whether to fold based on the size of the turn bet.

You seem to have a strong hand, but it’s definitely not the nuts.

Knowing you opponent helps and you must take his possible hands into consideration.

When you choose to bet you need a reason. Donking or check raising bloats the pot without any clear idea of what to do on the next street.

The 10 is ok, but loses to any 7 or pair higher than 10. So, I prefer controlling the pot from out of position.

If you choose to donk, or check raise, the info you opponent gives you by calling should raise alarm bells. He’s telling you he has a hand. Your job is to then consider whether his hand is better than yours, and then decide what to do facing any further aggression, including passive aggression.

Don’t blame you for jamming here after the donk bet. But slowing down and considering the possible hands you are up against May have led to a different result.

That being said, I suffer from the same “fast” condition. That’s why they build in the 15 second clock online.

[george]

Check-calling is definitely an option. I put this into Snowie and the position of the opener and bet size all matter. Against a UTG open, it donks something like 14% and check-calls the rest. Against a button min raise, it donks 33% and it check-raises more than it check-calls. Matthew Janda wrote, “ there is no quick and hard rule for this, but with many top pair hands there often appears to exist a ‘sweet spot’ for making aggressive flop check-raises. The hand needs to be both vulnerable so the check-raise will deny a significant amount of equity, yet still strong enough that it can handle playing the turn and River out of position against a stronger range for a bloated pot.”

[fivebyfive]

We can occasionally donk or lead on boards like this one. It kind of depends how deep we are and where pokergeek opened from. The earlier his position, the more we have an advantage with 7s. Yes, he’ll be weighted to overpairs, but it is exceedingly hard for him to raise our donk bet in this spot, so I probably wouldn’t do it all that often, but I don’t mind it. As I mentioned, I’m more likely checking here. And when we do, we just have to check call rather than check raise. Especially because this is early and we are so deep. If we’re 80-100bbs deep and this pot starts getting huge, our KT is basically never good. So why would we be raising? So my preferred line here is check call.

Check calling keeps bluffs in range and keeps the pot small. Sometimes it may feel like top pair is something we want to get a lot of chips in the middle with, but when we’re this deep, it rarely is. We should play accordingly. Yes, sometimes our opponent is going to have AQ and the turn will be a Q and we “let them get there.” But here’s the thing, when that happens, the pot is still small. So we lost a small pot. Okay, moving on. Much worse is to overplay this hand and find ourselves with 100bbs in the middle against a 7, overpairs, TT, or AT. There is a lot out there that beats us, we should not be raising here.

And if it goes ck ck, all the better, now we have some more confidence in our hand. Playing out of position is hard, and it is important to find some spots to check raise on most boards. But this isn’t one of those spots. I’d far rather check raise with my 7x and hands that have equity but no current value (89, J8, 68 etc.). This is the concept of polarization (strong and weak holdings taking aggressive action) while the condensed (middle part of our range) takes the more passive action.

When we raise with 7x, we can get called by worse. When we raise with J8, we can get better to fold. When we raise with KT, we allow our opponent to play nearly perfectly against us.

[george]

Makes sense. Using Janda’s conditions mentioned above, KT is probably not a good candidate because the K means you don’t need to deny equity to hands like KQ and KJ, and KT’s equity is not as robust as a hand with better chances to improve. So if you’re ever going to check-raise top pair here, something like T9 might be better, since it needs protection and has some chance to improve.