That is something I have never realised, but is very interesting how much it changes. I don't think I can get my head around why our equity increases when we add a player into the hand? I'm guessing that it is just because it is removing cards which are not good for us but are good for him because if they come we miss our draw.
In my example, your equity in terms of an absolute percentage increases (we went from below 50% to above it) for exactly that reason. We have 12 of 43 possible cards that leave our opponents drawing dead as opposed to 12 of 45.
In most cases our equity will decrease somewhat as a percentage but our EV at the same time will skyrocket. The main idea here is that equities are only ever going to total 100% no matter how many hands call down. When KQ enters the mix its equity (it does have 2 overcards and backdoor straight potential after all) will have to be stolen from one or more of the other hands. Holding 5:heart:4:heart:, we are not concerned at all with KQ as it does nothing to change the number of outs we have or possible redraws. If we lose, we don't particularly care who we lose to. Top/top however is obv vulnerable to the live overcards so the equity the 3rd hand here steals comes exclusively from the ATo. With the strength of AT neutered our 54s is now by far the most likely hand to win of the 3.
In short, we hit a flush or straight at roughly the same frequency but we now win twice as much money for doing so thanks to the overlay from KQo. It's an immensely profitable situation.
If this is the case wouldn't we want everyone else who is in the hand to be folding as if they are calling they are more likely to have some kind of draw as well, thus reducing our outs.
Nah. If they have our outs among their hole cards, folding won't help put them on the board as opposed to in the muck. Maybe if you fold face up directly onto the flop (there's a a dealer around here the table pretty much always does that to... lol). Ranging your opponents is always going to be key. If that K:club:Q:spade: turned out to instead be something like A:heart:3:heart:, then ofc we're now crippled, winning about 13% of showdowns. Going back to live poker, you see a lot of short stacks and a lot of wide calls, so it's not often something to be too concerned about. Dealing with ranges instead of exact hands doesn't change the principle here, although against deep stacks and tighter raising/stacking ranges then baby flushes not to mention baby sets etc get very troublesome.
I have no idea what I'm trying to get at. Sorry OP for thread jack. I think I just like to read my own text.