The 2+2 Forum Archives: BEHOLD, the importance of fold equity!!

I'm making this post instead of hijaking the >50% thread currently going on, but the idea here is to illustrate an enormously important concept that's at play in that thread.

You're playing Foxwoods, 1/2NL, which means you have 100 in front and a full stack. The villain in this hand will have you covered.

Let's say you hold 5

in the BB, The person
under the gun opens the pot to 15 dollars, and four people call. You decide to call out of the big blind.

The flop ($90): 8

You have 85 left in front. Small blind checks.

Now everyone turns over their hands, and you realize that everyone has absolute crap, and you know that they'll fold to ANY bet, no matter what. The only exception is the preflop raiser, UTG, who has A

UTG looks at you and says "If you check, I'm going all in. If you go all in, then you can tell me whether to call or fold, and I'll do it." You believe him.

Now let's say you have twodimes.net available on you cell phone and key in the odds real quick. you find out that you have 63% equity in this pot. You have the best hand, so you decide to shove. Now the question is, do you tell him to call, or fold?

Think for a minute about the answer to this question, becuase it is massively important.

The answer, of course, is that you want him to fold.

Let's look at the two scenarios, starting with a call.

HE CALLS

You commit your 85 dollar stack to a 90 dollar pot and get a call. That puts a total of 260 dollars in the pot. Your pot equity here is 63%, so your gross EV is .63(260) = 163.8 dollars, for a profit EV of 163.8 - 85 = 78.8 dollars. Not bad. Let's see what happens when he folds:

HE FOLDS
When he folds, you win 90 dollars every time--that is, you win the 90 in the pot for your 85 dollar bet. So your EV when he folds is 90. That's more than when he calls as a relatively significant underdog. So how can that be? How can him calling as an underdog be a comparatively bad thing for you?

It's got to do with the money that's in the pot. Note here in that in both cases--him calling and him folding--you are +EV. While his call IS BAD FOR YOU, it's not bad for you in the sense that you're losing money. YOu're still winning money when he calls, BUT YOURE NOT WINNING AS MUCH as when he folds. And the reason for that is becuase, when he folds, he FORFEITS HIS PORTION OF THE POT.

Of the 90 dollars in the pot, (90)(.63) = 56.7 of those dollars belong to you, and the rest belong to the guy with AK (remember that we assumed every other player would instantly forfeit his portion of the pot). When you go all in, you bet 85. If your opponent with Ah Kh calls, he's investing 85 dollars as an underdog. That is, he's investing 85 dollars of which (85)(.63) = 53.55 is
coming to you, but in making that investment, he's MAINTAINTING HIS CLAIM to his portion of the 90 dollars already in the pot.

So while it's okay if he calls because youre still winning money, you'd like for your opponent to fold his hand, even though you're pretty far ahead. What you've done is to make him forfeit the portion of a sizable pot that he's
entitled to. THAT is the beauty and importance of fold equity and the beauty of the semi-bluff-- and it's why you're not really semi-bluffing unless you can
make your opponent fold some of the time.

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