A popular play especially among bad players is to lead into the preflop raiser on the flop. This is usually a small bet and it obviously goes against the flow of the action. You will routinely encounter these kinds of bets at the micros so it is important to spend some time talking about how to proceed against them. These types of bets can mean a lot of different things depending on the player type. The first thing that I usually do is check the full popup in HEM,
In the above example you can see that this particular player is donk betting 45% of the time. As I mentioned during the HUD section, you always need to be aware of the sample size when interpreting stats. You are probably going to need at least 100 hands before using this stat. In this particular case we will be just fine.
Somebody who is donk betting at 45% has a pretty wide range of hands. We know that on average, you are only going to make a pair or better on the flop around 33% of the time. This player is betting with a considerably higher frequency than that. He is going to have plenty of weak hands in his range here. So I would probably raise in this spot a lot of the time. It should be noted that you don’t have to raise that much. Usually a donk bet is small anyways, such as 1/4 pot, so you could just 3x it and get the desired effect.
Also, it a good idea to have some sort of equity when you raise their donk bet even if it is as weak as a gutshot or two overs. This is because while you will get a lot of folds by raising, you will still get called by all of their draws and paired hands. It is nice to be able to check down ace high for the win or at least have 6 outs to best them on later streets.
