---

Poker Video: Limit Hold'Em by DeathDonkey (Micro/Small Stakes)

DD
Of all your videos, I enjoyed this one the most.
Your commentary and analysis are always high level, rapid paced and precise.
But this one you seemed more human, rather than a poker machine...lol.
I enjoyed your belittling of your own play, I laughed a lot, you can be funny.

I agree with you , I dont think you played your best.
A few times your original reads were right on, but later in the hand you talked yourself into having enough equity to call. a key is when you say.."that being said"..
I think you should tend to go more with your orignal read.

It was a great video, and as always I learned a lot, and I got some laughs too....ty.

Great video. Big thanks to deathdonkey for doing a series on this. i just started HU a month ago and have been doing okay, i want to do better and i think this will really help. Again, big thanks to death donkey and keep em' coming!

This video was great.

DD had a great read on this guy. It really was like he is a passive player and just decided that "I'm going to play aggro today" when he started, but quickly went back to his more natural style.

I thought it was great how DD seemed more human in this as well. I liked it when he was talking about how he was not happy with his play because for whatever reason he was making unnecessary calls.

I think every limit player feels like that sometimes? Why do we do it?

Sorry to be so late...

I have a question on on hand late in the match.
Minute 1:12:
you hold T5d on 4s6cQd boards and decide to c/r as a semi-bluff
Opponent decides to 3-bet and yet you say your 5's and T's are likely to be good.
While I have no problem with the T's to be good, I'm not so sure about the 5's. They complete his range too. Or are you specifically implying he has 57, 53 and your T kicker is good?
Also, doesn't the 3-bet show such strength that you have to give him credit for at least a good hand. I mean, yeah, after the T falls on the turn, you never fold the hand, but hasn't the opponent played for value straightforwardly up until now? Is calling down on the turn a a mistake?

Hey bellatrix,

Well reading this hand many days later, I think my flop call is a close mistake, and I was being too optimistic about my out counting. Generally speaking, I expect flop 3 bets to show more weakness than flop calls followed by turn raises, so I often discount the highest card on the board (feeling with top pair or better they would call and raise the turn), and I did have a backdoor flush draw (an important part of any decision where I CR bluff a flop usually). I wasn't specifically saying my 5's were good because I thought he could have 53 or 76 a lot, more so because I thought he could have overcards a lot (or overcards to the 6, like A9 or something).

In retrospect I think I should have folded, for the reasons you mention.

-DeathDonkey

Nice video as always!

In one hand you were in the button and he 3bets you, he bets flop and bets turn.
You have Ad3d and the board was TsTcJh8c, pot odds of 5:1 and you folded.
I stoved that, and against reasonable 3betting ranges you have between 17% and 25% equity, you have lots of outs against big aces and 22-77.
A better line (looking at pokerstove) would be calling the turn, and calling any non K, Q, 9, 7 river.

Hey Raist,

Thanks for the kind words, looking back on it, I do agree with you and appreciate you taking the time to stove it. Lots of close spots in heads up and I definitely don't get them all right at the time.

-DeathDonkey

At 13:20 or so, you check-raise the flop of K 7 2 with 5 7 . I think this is a mistake, because of the hands that will (at least) call down, there are more combinations of hands that are ahead of 57 than are hands that are behind. Even assuming that he will call down with any ace, which he'll have to do so that you don't have a profitable check-raise bluff with any two cards on this type of board. (Though even that's not quite enough, so he'll have to re-bluff for small portion of the time too.) Also, if more money is going in, you are going to have the second best hand most of the time. Having the BDFD subsidizes this a bit, but not nearly enough to make this a profitable check-raise on the flop.

IMO, I guess. ;-)

First hand, at 09:00 or so, you raise Q 9 on the button and villain defends. Flop comes 2 T 8 and your opponent check/calls. Turn comes 3 and you check behind.

In general, I think you would agree that you should bet this turn, because villain's peeling range on the flop is huge and even against better hands you have good equity with gutshot and an overcard + overcard to the 2nd pair (even against an unlikely turn check-raise you're not completely dead). It's probably the case that your opponent would mostly be folding worse hands when you bet the turn (he might fold some weak king highs), but that's not an issue, because you aren't calling blank rivers if you check behind on the turn anyhow, so you're not gaining much anything against those worse hands by the line you've taken. (Except for the case when you do improve to a better hand, of course.)

Also, you mention that you want to take lines early in the match that allow you take to showdown more often, but I don't think that's such a good plan in this particular situation, because you're often still going to get bluffed on the river, and you're not able to call unimproved. When your opponent checks again on the river, you're (presumably) going to check behind, but in this situation you're not going to be good that often, because mostly you're going to see hands like king highs and weak to medium strength ace highs. So the times you do get to showdown with this line, you're going not be good too often (on average), and would have probably shown a better profit by just 2nd barreling on the turn.

In one hand you were in the button and he 3bets you, he bets flop and bets turn. You have Ad3d and the board was TsTcJh8c, pot odds of 5:1 and you folded.
I stoved that, and against reasonable 3betting ranges you have between 17% and 25% equity, you have lots of outs against big aces and 22-77.
A better line (looking at pokerstove) would be calling the turn, and calling any non K, Q, 9, 7 river.

Another minor point is that if we assumed that the range is such that we can't call the turn bet, it's probably also the case that we can't call the flop bet either. (Though certainly one shouldn't make a habit out of folding on the flop with this sort of hands against decently aggressive 3-bettor.) In other words, the reason why have a profitable call on the turn too is pretty much the same as it is on the flop.

(I haven't actually analyzed this any further, but this is how I felt when I saw the hand.)

There are some other plays that I somewhat disagree with (one was peeling the flop of J72r with 94o when the villain 3-bet preflop), but most of those were at least partly influenced by the flow and dynamics of the game which I guess might change the strategies so much as to justify decisions that might not always be the most profitable in vacuum. And even if some of these decisions were mistakes, I might all wrong in any case, they are all certainly pretty close.

(I personally don't make much of the dynamics of the game, except perhaps for to account for differently weighed hand distributions.)

At first, I really like this series! Even tough I like jajvirta see some plays, where as for example the 85o call on the turn at minute 47, which are maybe reasoned but imho with the wrong thoughts in this case vs. this opponent since he is so passive.

Time Link to 01:09:28

Awww kitty!

At 44:30, DD's got K3 on a 475tt flop. DD says “It’s a good board for him to give me credit for a middling hand.” Even if that’s the case, wouldn’t the villain still be peeling (at the very least) with any 2 overs, any 3, 6, or 8, any 2 diamonds, any single high diamond for a potential BDFD, etc (obviously as well as with any pair)? Given that there’s so much the villain could be peeling with, how far are you comfortable continuing to fire on this board unimproved?

Or, maybe the better question to help me understand - what is he folding here? Or what SHOULD he be folding here? Cause on a board like this, I can see myself peeling a lot, and it'd be nice to know what I should be folding on it.