In this post we are going to look at the art of pressing the fold button, something that sounds easy but if not done the correct amount can cost us a huge amount of money.

There will be two mistakes players make when it comes to folding hands:

1. 1. Folding too much, also known as being too tight
   2. Not folding enough, also known as being a calling station

We want to play between these two errors as best as we can, the middle ground is where the money is made.

Let’s look at some points about Folding

Folding your hand in Poker will give up all your equity in the pot, even if you have a gutshot straight draw against a very strong hand in a pot you will have some equity in the pot, which means we will win at least a small percentage of the time, however when we fold we never realise that equity.

We Can Become a Target

Folding too much will make us too easy to play against, let’s say we are playing heads up and we are only ever continuing with our strong hands, then our opponent can just take a lot of stabs at pots and just never lose many chips when we play back at them.

Folding too often means our opponents can just keep winning pots without really ever having anything too good, Poker is a funny old game where a lot of the time no one actually has much of a hand, so we need to know when we have to continue without having much ourselves.

We want to pick up on players frequencies and act accordingly

Quite often when we play with someone we can work out a lot about their strategy from just a few hands, even just one hand sometimes. If someone calls you down with not much of a hand in a pot we need to know that we should be value betting them wider but bluffing them much less.

Look at this hand where Dan Smith goes for a huge River bluff against his opponents capped range, he calls the flop with just King high and bets large on the turn, followed by a River All-in.

These are the types of things our opponents are capable of, but too many times we can just look at this hand and say, oh well, he probably just has an Ace here.

A good thing to pick up on is what do our opponents’ large river bets usually mean because this is the part where some players are very unbalanced. Some players will only bet large on the end for value and others get a little gunshy and check back some value hands on the river but will bet large with their bluffs.

For example, the hand where Dan moves all-in with his KTo on the River as a bluff… would he overbet jam ATo here with a decent top pair for value, or would bet small. These are the key points we will want to find out about someone’s game, once we have a little more information we can use this for future pots until that information changes.

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