I’m a long time poker player. Mostly 7 Stud so I am accustomed to playing with the intention of winning showdowns. I’m not new to NL but I am trying to adjust to the game as it’s played today. One concept I can’t seem to grasp is fold equity. Can someone give me an easy to understand explanation?

your opponent will fold a certain amount of time when you bet. your fold equity is what you would expect to get as a result

So fold equity is the pot? Sorry man. I really don’t get it for some reason.

If someone folds 40% of the time your fold equity is 40% of the pot.

It is the portion of the pot, which corresponds to the fold frequency of an opponent’s range, on a given board texture.

So, if pot is 100, and the board favors the bettor, then the likelihood of getting a fold with a 1/2 pot bet might be 50 percent. This means you have an immediate expected return of 50 by simply betting range.

This makes c-bets (betting flop after betting pre-flop) very profitable.

You have equity in the pot. Your opponent has equity in the pot. (I am going to assume that you understand the concept of equity.) When you bet, your opponent sometimes folds, forfeiting his equity in the pot. The equity he would give up is your fold equity.

This doesn't mean that you should always bluff. You also have equity in your bet and your opponent's call when he doesn't fold. Your bet equity that you give away might be less than the fold equity that you gain by betting.

Assume the pot is 100. Your card equity is 30% (your share of the pot) and therefore villain’s card equity is 70% or 70 in chip/$ terms. If villain folds, he gives up the 70. But, villain doesn’t always fold and this definition doesn’t reflect that.

The action to be taken could be quite different if villain folds 85% of the time as opposed to only folding 10% of the time.

I like to give fold equity the simple definition of the likelihood (or frequency or probability) that villain folds. In the example it would be simply the 85% or the 10%. The equity villain gives up by folding would be captured in the applicable EV equation.

Obviously neither definition is wrong if used correctly.

"If someone folds 40% of the time your fold equity is 40% of the pot."


This definition is consistent with mine except for stating fold equity in chip/$ terms. It should be noted that the pot is the amount before hero bets.

I used to think that there is always SOME non-zero fold equity in every situation.

Maybe there always is.

But if it is more like 1% or 5% instead of something worth counting on, it gets pretty expensive to find out the hard way.

If a Villain has already bet, there is lots less fold equity in us raising him than if we are first to bet.

If a Villain has already checked, usually there is more fold equity than if we are first to bet.

If a Villain hates to fold (duh) there is less fold equity.

If a Villian is older than me (that's pretty damn old) there is more fold equity.

Unless he only plays 5% of his hands, then there is barely any fold equity.

"It depends".

You can think of your overall equity as your pot equity plus your fold equity. So, if you use an example where you have 30% equity, but your opponent folds 40% of the time, then your overall equity would be 70% according to how you calculate things, but that's not right, because part of your 30% is included in the 40% of the time that he folds, so you are double-counting it and your overall equity is less than 70%.

Your fold equity is the percentage of hands that your opponent folds times the pot equity of his folding range. It is how much equity you gain by your opponent folding.

If your opponent is drawing dead for his entire range (has 0% equity), then you have no fold equity because you don't gain any equity by betting and making him fold.

Here is where fold equity becomes terribly confusing to people. People do not really know how to use it. they try to add it to showdown equity. This is problematic for a couple of reasons. As pointed out, fold equity and showdown equity overlap, so simply adding them doesn't give you a correct number. Secondly, and more importantly, fold equity gives you equity in a different pot than showdown equity. If I have a pot, and I make a bet on the river, fold equity is just equity in that pot, while showdown equity is equity on the pot plus the call.

It is better, in my opinion, to look at things from the standpoint of EV, not equity. EV considers each possible outcome, the probability of that outcome, and the value of that outcome, separately, then uses that information to create a final approximation of the expected value of each option. It is really not as complex as it sounds, but it does take a little practice.

Not necessarily. For example, if he bets and we raise, that represents a lot more strength than if he checks and we bet. This might or might not be offset by the fact that his bet represented some sort of interest in the pot to begin with.

Well that's a little misleading. EV and equity without a qualifier are the same thing. Your equity in the hand includes both your showdown equity and your fold equity. In other words, your EV.

Ok so I think I’m getting it now. Does my range (position) against the board play a role or is it strictly the action of betting itself?


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Equity is typically expressed as a percentage, but combing fold equity and showdown equity is misleading, because you are talking about equity of two different pot sizes. You can't easily express equity as a percentage when combining fold equity and showdown equity.

Yes, FE is a moving target and combines a few floating variables and assumptions. Scenario ...

Pot is 50 and you are facing a bet of 25. You assume you have 30% equity in the hand. Easy call getting 3 to 1 here ... assuming no further action this is what you are getting.

Win 100 chips 30% of the time (+30) & lose 25 chips 75% of the time (-18.75). So your net EV is +11.25 .. but can we do better you think?


Let's raise to 200 and go with the following ...

1) Opponent folds 50% of their range, win 75 chips 50% of the time (+37.5)
2) Opponent calls and we win 450 chips 15% of the time (+67.5)
3) Opponent calls and we lose 200 chips 35% of the time (-70.0)

Our net EV is now +35 .. which is much better than 11.25

But ... Enter the 'sticky' opponent who calls our raise 80% of the time

1) Folds only 20% of range ... +15
2) Win 450 24% ... +108
3) Lose 200 56% ... -112

Our net EV is now +11, basically the same as flatting above.

So for me fold equity requires combining/comparing the best bet size required to get my opponent to fold a 'significant' portion of their range. As you can see, the EV spread when called is fairly small in both cases, so your EV gain is obtaining a higher percentage of folds at that bet size. The assumption is that the more polarizing the bet size the more folds you can create, thus a better EV for the move. (A raise of 100 is not much different than a raise of 400 unless it can move the calling % of the opponent.)

Another factor can be that your equity in the hand may change against the portion of their range that they are willing to call with, thus increasing the EV spread of a call much more significantly.

Hope this makes sense to you, I had some fun doing this post ... GL

I don't think this is right. 30% of the time you win 75, and 70% of the tme you lose 25, for an EV of 5. If you want to include your cal in the pot, then calculation would be that 100% of the time you spend 25, but 30% of that time you win 100. So your EV would be 30-25, or 5


50% of the time you win 75 out right. Of that other 50%, 30% of the time you win 250, 70% of the time you lose 200. Your EV should be 5, exactly equal to flatting.


In this case, your EV is -37

Your calculations are skewed because you included your call in your winning, without also offsetting that as a cost.

Best bet is to set up a spreadsheet and start to model common scenerios with common opponent types. This will give a you a sense for how powerful fold equity is in certain situations and certain stack sizes.

I didn't really like that number when I first put it in there, but at least I carried my mistake throughout the whole post!!

Let's calculate EV based on the potential net change (both gain and loss) in your 'pre-calling' stack size then.

Man, poker was a lot more fun yesterday ... GL


PS ... I've always scoffed at those TV/stream comments about a guy who shoves 10M into a HU pot of 10M and they say 'he won' 20M when the other guys folds. (He actually only won 5M.)

I agree that expressing them can be more difficult, but I don't agree that the concept of combining them is misleading. Your fold equity and your showdown equity is exactly the definition of EV as the hand is played out. The fact that coming up with the exact numbers of those things is difficult is beside the point IMO.

All the OP has to know is that fold equity is the amount he expects to win if his opponent folds. If the pot is $100 on the river and he moves all in and there is a 60% chance his opponent folds (or to put it another way, his opponent folds 60% of the time), then his fold equity is $60. That is not difficult to understand. What is difficult is coming up with the 60% number.

Now we add the $60 to our share of the pot the 40% of the time our opponent calls. This is where things get more hazy.

That all depends on your perspective of time in the hand. Most poker players would say he won $10M, I think.

Your range against the board is one of the things that helps determine the probability your opponent will fold. The higher the probability your opponent will fold, the higher your fold equity in the pot.

For example, let's say you raise to $50 preflop and only one person calls. Let's just call the pot $100 now. Let's say you're a relatively tight player.

Scenario 1: the flop is A73. Now you bet $80 on the flop. Let's say there is a 75% chance your opponent folds. This is because you are tight and your opponent will find it very likely you hit your ace. And on top of that, there are no draws your opponent could have. Your fold equity is $75.

Scenario 2: the flop is jT9. Now you bet $80 again but this time there is only a 40% chance your opponent folds (guessing). This is because of your ranges. First of all, there is no ace so it takes that out of the equation as your opponent has seen many players make this same play with AK or AQ. Second, there are many draws your opponent can have that he won't fold. Third, this flop is more likely to have made him a pair or better made hand than the first flop. So now your fold equity is only $40.

Your position can also have some affect, although less. When players bet from early position they generally get more respect than player who bet in late position. But at the same time that late position bets are more suspicious, it's also more likely that no one has anything. For example if you're on the button in a 3 way hand and the first 2 people check the flop, you might have more fold equity because it's likely your opponents don't have anything. But this could change against certain opponents who like to bluff a lot, and therefore are suspicious of other people bluffing. If they think button bets are always bluffs, then they will call more and your fold equity goes down.

To be more accurate, how your opponent views your range and how he values position affect what hands he is willing to fold, which affects your fold equity. It doesn't matter what your actual range is.

Ultimately, I think fold equity is supposed to help you think of everything in terms of equity instead of the number of outs you have or need to fade or some other framework. There are different ways of saying mostly the same thing, but fold equity is a way to talk about bluffing if you are already using the concept of equity to analyze the hand, which is a good way to go about if you are thinking about how your range matches up against your opponent's range. It might be more work than is needed if you are playing small stakes and your level of analysis involves your specific hand against your opponent's range.

We aren't disagreeing on concept, but in terminology. Even though I don't agree with it (having a business background, i think of equity as a quantity of value), equity (fold or showdown) is almost always expressed as a percentage. My point is that you simply cannot combine percentages of fold equity and showdown equity to get your total equity, as the percentages are of different amounts.

That is why I make the distinction between equity and EV. In most of the literature I have seen, equity is expressed as a percentage, while EV is expressed as a value, and is the weighted sum of all possible outcomes.

EV and equity, while related terms and mathematically equivalent, are not used interchangeably. My caution to OP was to make sure, when looking at equity, you knew what you were taking equity in. 20% fold equity and 40% showdown equity is not equal to 60% total equity, though some literature says that it is. Your example is basically supporting the point I am making.

Right.

I think I see it now. So I’m late position with a TAG image against someone in early position. Raise 3 bet flat call is the action.

I’m holding A:heart K:Spade. Flop comes 3:heart 7:spade 9:heart. Action. Turn is a Q:club action River is a T:heart. I shove over river bet.

Not discussing the exact numbers regarding value the A:heart blocker gives me fold equity.

Am I on the right track here?


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