Fold Equity?

[jack spade23]

Heard someone use the term "fold equity", wondering if I could get a definition etc. thanks

[jtr]

The money you stand to make due to the chance your opponents will fold to a bet. If you've got one weak tight player who's checked to you, and you were the preflop raiser, you have a lot of fold equity as he'll probably lay it down to a bet. If you are first to act and have five calling stations and a maniac behind you, you have pretty much zero fold equity.

[jack spade23]

This may be stupid, but is it just a judgement call? or is there actually a way to assign numbers to fold equity using the pot? I wouldn't think so, but...

[K C]

Nice avatar /images/graemlins/smile.gif

It's a judgement call in a sense, but only because you'll be judging your opponents' tendency to fold. Here's the simplest way to look at this. Let's say we're playing heads up. I've got my trusty notebook out and I've been tracking the percentage of times you've been folding to me when I lead on the flop. It turns out that you fold about half the time in this situation. There are two bets in the pot right now. So I'm risking one bet to win 2. And I have a 50% chance to win them based upon your folding tendencies. So I've got enough fold equity to make the bet, which would be calculated in terms of netting 2 bets 50% of the time, and losing 1 bet 50% of the time (we'll assume this at this point for the purposes of calculation). So the fold equity here would be half a bet.

Of course, you want to vary your play enough not to make this stuff too obvious. If you bet into an opponent every time under these circumstances, then you can go to the well too much, and even dense players may catch on. This is less of a concern against a full table of course.

KC
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