Last year, I spent a lot of time on the road (or, rather, in the air) travelling mostly to Beijing. Most of these (business) trips, I went on my own and therefore spent some time in the hotel room playing online poker. Not having access to PokerTracker and my notes (as I didn’t have that on my work laptop) meant that I was playing “blind” versus my opponents. Since I was going to play blind anyway, I figured I might as well play a style of game that I didn’t usually engage in, so I started fiddling with NL cash games, and intended to write about what I perceived the differences to be. As I stopped travelling to Asia, the experiment “ran out in the sand” (do you have that expression in English? I’m sure you know what I mean, anyway) and this blog was left with just a few posts on the topic.

One of these posts is one of this blog’s most read texts, weirdly enough, and it’s because it has the keywords “fold equity” in it. Apparently a lot of people struggle with this concept and google it; my post is the fifth on google for “fold equity.” It’s been linked on 2+2. It’s referenced on the Wikipedia article for fold equity.

And it’s incorrect.

Sad, isn’t it? I mean, I knew back then what fold equity was, but I still made the small - but fundamental - error of using the word “better.” Here’s the paragraph I’m talking about:

“The expected value that comes from the chance that someone folds the best hand and gives me the pot.”

But my opponent’s hand doesn’t have to be better than mine in order for me to have fold equity. In fact, consider this situation:

I have 2-2 in the big blind. The button open-raises, I three-bet and he calls. Since he (virtually always) has at least six outs on any given flop if not ahead of me, he’d be wrong to fold any two cards when I bet the flop if he knew what I had, as he will be getting 7:1 (or possibly slightly better depending on rake). His pot equity, if he missed and didn’t pair up, is in the neighborhood of 25%. His hand isn’t “best” but by betting I can make him fold his 25-percenter. That’s fold equity.

3-betting small pocket pairs from the big blind is done precisely for this reason. We’re likely to be behind (but not by far) most hands that raise preflop, but by taking back initiative we will vastly increase our fold equity which in turn greatly increases our expected value. With unimproved small pocket pairs, we don’t want a showdown because a showdown almost always means we’ve lost. Pumping our fold equity is therefore good.

/FP