[Talking Poker]

This topic came up in , but I think it's worthy of it's own thread. You can go read the details there, but here is a quick summary in a nutshell:

A "donk bet" is when someone leads into the preflop raiser on the flop. Generally, this person either limps in preflop and then calls a raise, or they call a raise from the blinds, but they are always out of position against the preflop raiser. Then they lead out at the flop.

In my experience as the preflop raiser, I've had great (perceived?) success in raising in this situation. In the other thread, I guessed that with a decent raise, I take the pot down right there more than 50% of the time, making this a +EV play, assuming I'm not overbetting the pot with my raise (and I'm not).

Other people have had very different experiences with raising donk bets:

-meanness says he wins the pot with that raise about 5% of the time.
-sjay guesses it's 15-20% for him.
-Reel Deal guesses it's close to 50% for him.
-Robbr says he wins the pot "most of the time" - so > 50%.

So, what are the real numbers? Well, that tricky little de-coder came up with a way for us to find out. I have yet to do so on my own data, but I will shortly. Here were de-coder's results from analyzing his 560k hand, full ring, cash game observed database - mostly $50 and $100 NL (I'm editing what he wrote to what I believe we are now agreeing the formula is doing):

So, it seems that random $50NL and $100NL players are having about a 40% success rate with raising donk bets. But what kind of table image do they have? Are they raising the correct amounts, on flops with the right texture, against the right opponents? We don't know. So I think it would be better to analyze our own data.

So let's do that. Here's how:

1. First, in order to run some SQL against your db, you need to do this:

Next, figure out what your Player_ID is by pasting the following in the top window and hit F5 - The results will appear in the bottom window:

select player_id, screen_name from players where screen_name like 'YourScreenNameHere%'

Now that you have your player ID, copy and paste this into the top window and hit F5 again. This will give you the results for the hands when YOU were the preflop raiser:

select count(x.game_id) from game_players x join game_players y on x.game_id = y.game_id and y.fbet = 1 and y.praise != 1 where x.raised_first_pf = 1 and x.fraise = 1 and x.fcheck != 1 and x.real_player_id = YourPlayerIDGoesHere

Lastly, this will give you the number of times the donk bettor folded to your flop raise:

select count(x.game_id) from game_players x join game_players y on x.game_id = y.game_id and y.fbet = 1 and y.praise != 1 and y.ffold = 1 where x.raised_first_pf = 1 and x.fraise = 1 and x.fcheck != 1 and x.real_player_id = YourPlayerIDGoesHere

If you'd like to see the general numbers for everyone in your database (not just the numbers where you were the preflop raiser) or if you want to run this against your Observer Hands database, just remove this part from the query and run it again:

and x.real_player_id = YourPlayerIDGoesHere

Be aware - these queries might take a while to run, so be patient.

OK, I'm going to screw with this for a while and post my results. I think it would be very cool if everyone reading this right now did the same. Hint, hint.