The Only Good Hand Was the Last Hand - FOLD EQUITY

The Only Good Hand Was the Last Hand - FOLD EQUITY

 

        http://www.exceptionalpoker.com/?p=1043

"It is the equity a player can expect to gain due to the opponent folding to his or her bets."

Folding?
It depends as much on the type of table you are at as it does the type of player you are playing, maybe more.

Most comments about any type of play center around a specific player and tends to be focused on becoming heads up after the flop, if not during the flop.

That only happens about 30%-40% of the time live and almost nonexistent on-line. Aggressiveness is the only game in town when paying on-line, but in a live cash game, aggression is sometimes fleeting, most times it's random to intermittent.

If you're at an aggressive table, there may be no real fold equity, because you are usually up against 2 to 3 villains. If you don't really know how much they have in their pocket, which you don't, you can't really tell how aggressive they are going to be. If you have watched the table, which you should have before sitting down, you can tell who is the Loose Aggressive and who is the Selective Aggressive player. Their fold equity is quite a bit different than the passive player that sits in-between them.

Essentially, fold equity is the extra amount of equity you gain when you factor in how likely your opponent is to fold. Working out the correct amount of fold equity relies heavily on your ability to read an opponent. In other words, you need to be fairly certain of your chances to get an opponent to fold. But how about 2 villains or even 3?

The formulas you read about in the most popular strategy sites are only good for a head-to-head battle.
With multiple opponents, you have to rely on multiple reads and your initial threat assessment for each villain.

A final word of warning…https://www.partypoker.com/how-to-play/school/advanced/fold-equity.html

When playing against really loose aggressive players, your fold equity will likely be close to zero. This is also the case against players with really short stacks (very few playing chips) at a cash/ring game as well as in tournaments. Short-stacked players are less likely to fold, as they need to take more risks.

I NEVER BLUFF

Mr Lucky's Law on SLOW Playing

USS Cairo was a City-class ironclad gunboat constructed for the Union Navy by James Buchanan Eads during the American Civil War, 1861, was named for Cairo, Illinois.

There is nothing Ironclad in playing poker.

OK, here's the deal. Poker players, professional and amature, hate players who slow play a hand.
That being said, there is no Sportsmanship in Poker, same thing with Hockey, but that another story. Unlike Hockey, Poker players are not supposed to cheat and slow playing is not cheating. It's what some players do to build the pot because they think they are invincible with hands like AA.
Slow playing will lose you money.

Here's my RULE or axiom:
If you can be beat at the river, you will be beat at the river, when it will lose you the most money.
If you have a hand like AA, KK, or QQ, you can slow play before the flop if you are the first to act and you have normally aggressive players after you, with AA, KK you should raise any bet they make at least 2x to 3x their bet, call with QQ; otherwise always play aggressive from start to finish.

About Slow Playing

Slow playing (also called sandbagging or trapping) is deceptive play in poker that is roughly the opposite of bluffing: betting weakly or passively with a strong holding rather than betting aggressively with a weak one. The flat call is one such play. The objective of the passive slow play is to lure opponents into a pot who might fold to a raise, or to cause them to bet more strongly than they would if the player had played aggressively (bet or raised). Slow playing sacrifices protection against hands that may improve and risks losing the pot-building value of a bet if the opponent also checks.

David Sklansky defines the following conditions for profitable slow plays:^[1]

• A player must have a very strong hand.
• The free card or cheap card the player is allowing to his opponents must have good possibilities of making them a second-best hand.
• That same free card must have little chance of giving an opponent a better hand or even giving them a draw to a better hand on the next round with sufficient pot odds to justify a call.
• The player must believe that he will drive out opponents by showing aggression, but can win a big pot if the opponents stay in the pot.
• The pot must not yet be very large.

*On 12 December 1862, while clearing mines from the river preparatory to the attack on Haines Bluff, the USS Cairo struck a "torpedo" (naval mine) detonated by volunteers hidden behind the river bank and she sank in 12 minutes; there were no casualties.

I Never Bluff