WHEN TO FOLD IN TEXAS HOLDEM

An important lesson to learn when you start playing Poker is that you can’t win every hand. Sometimes you will just lose, that’s how the game works. Knowing when you’re likely to lose and being able to fold is a vital skill as it will save you money and therefore increase your win rate. This is also vital for professional players who are making money in poker.

This becomes even more important as we move to later streets where pots and bet sizes become bigger and calling incorrectly will be even more costly.

For example, we have 8♠7♠ playing $1/$2 No-Limit Hold’em. Our nitty opponent raises on the button to $6 and we call in the BB. The flop is J♥9♥2♠ and our opponent bets $13 — a pot size bet. We’re not getting the right odds to draw to our straight so calling would be a mistake. We can expect our equity on average to be around 20% against a made hand and we need 33% equity to call. As we only have 60% of the equity we need we can say that we’ve made an equity mistake for around 40% of the bet — or $5.20

The turn is the 3♥, we miss our draw. Our opponent now bets $39 into the pot of $39. Now our equity against a made hand has gone down to around 8% so we now only have around 25% of the equity required. This means our equity mistake is 75% of the bet — or $29.25, almost 6x the cost of the flop mistake.

If we give ourselves more equity by making the turn the 3♠, we’re still making an equity mistake of around 25% — or $9.75. Even with giving ourselves more equity than on the flop, the dollar cost of our mistake is twice as high on the turn compared to the flop. This is one of the common poker mistakes.

On the river calling when we know we are beaten is even costlier. If we’re playing against a nitty opponent like our example, we can expect them to almost never bluff, meaning that we will almost never win by calling with a bluff catcher.

To continue the example the river is the 7♣ and our opponent bets the size of the pot for the 3rd time — $117. We know they’re a nit but something in our heads just convinces us they’re bluffing and we’ve made a pair so we can beat missed draws.

As we know our opponent is almost never bluffing, the cost of this mistake is equal to almost the entire bet of $117–23x the cost of the flop mistake.