Was this guy a donkey to call?

[AKQJ10]

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I don't like his call w/ the Q here (esp. w/ with an early limper yet to act), but KJ or so would be enough for me.

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Especially if you correctly read OP as a player with a clue about concepts like "Red Zone." At this point Hero is so short-stacked that calling with two honors doesn't seem too awful; there's a good chance QT is coin-flipping with A3s or something.

But he has no reason to know that you understand the Red Zone. From his perspective, you've been folding hands for hours and might have kept folding until you blinded out. So from that perspective I think it's awful.

DISCLAIMER: I'm mostly a cash game specialist for now.

Now, all that said, you shouldn't be waiting until the Red Zone if you get anything at all decent in the Orange Zone. At least that's my recollection of Harrington. It's hard to push that A8 with 7 BBL in your stack, but you probably need to do that. So if you've been folding decent hands the past couple of orbits, you're probably not adjusting your game sufficiently as your stack dwindles.

As many have stated, what does it matter whether the call was donkish or not? What if you were at the top of your range and he made a correct call and hit with six clear outs -- so what? All you can do is play it correctly. Sometimes you get the money in with AA, your opponent correctly gets the money in with KK, and your opponent wins with a set of kings. So what?

[DeuceSeven]

It was a bad limp and call. This is pretty common at the low buy in tourneys. They guy probably thought hmmm...I'll call I got big cards. Then you raised and he thought hmmm...I'll call I got big cards. What's worse is when you lose big hands that knock you out of the bubble or when your 3 handed where on average you are a 70% favorite and lose 90% of them over 30 sngs.