Hero Folding

This is an article I wrote a while ago for 2+2 Magazine. Posting it here now so that I can link someone to it.

My favorite feeling in poker is making some huge, heroic call on the river with a weak hand. To this day, the hand I’m most proud of is one I played in my very first World Series of Poker main event in 2006, when I correctly bet-called the turn and then called about 25% of my stack on the river with KQ on a JJ775 board (my opponent had T8s for a whiffed gutshot).

Big bluffs are exciting too, and thin value bets are a great reversal of the thrill of hero calling. Just when your opponent starts anticipating the thrill of catching you in a bluff, you pull the carpet out from under her by revealing that you knew the hero call was coming and just managed to squeeze another bet out of your third pair. It’s exciting stuff.

Of course, a big part of what makes these plays so spectacular is that they ultimately result in chips moving from the center of the table into your stack. This, I think, is why the hero fold doesn’t enjoy the place it deserves in the pantheon of great poker plays. Whereas big bluffs and hero calls offer the dual rewards of feeling like you made a great play and seeing a mountain of chips shipped your way, plus sometimes the oohs and aahs of your tablemates, the rewards of a heroic fold are mostly in your own head.

Yet these are some of the hardest plays to make in poker. Even great players commonly refer to themselves as “stations” and admit to paying off more than they should. If you’d had the discipline to fold every time you had that nagging feeling that you were beat, your bankroll would be a lot fatter than it is today.

Because you aren’t getting the external rewards that come with big bluffs and calls, the key to making better hero folds is to derive satisfaction from the feeling of knowing that you made a great play, which in the end counts for more than winning, losing or the respect of your peers anyway.

You’ll Never Be Sure

The first thing you have to give up on is the desire for confirmation. When you fold, your opponent doesn’t have to show his hand, and he probably won’t. That means that you won’t know – never will know – for sure that you were beat. Your satisfaction has to come from inside, from knowing that you had the discipline to fold a hand that most people couldn’t bring themselves to fold. You looked past your own hand to make a good read, and then you put confidence in your read and made the laydown.

Ultimately, self-satisfaction is the only kind of satisfaction there is. Even if your opponent does show his hand, that doesn’t mean your fold was necessarily good or bad. Maybe your fold was correct and he happened to have a very rare bluff. Seeing one hand is still just a small glimpse at a big picture, so don’t worry about the results. Learn to congratulate yourself for discipline and a good thought process.

That also means no folding face-up. People do this all the time when they make big folds, and it’s a disaster. Your ability to make a big fold reveals so much about how you read hands, interpret bets, and generally think about poker. Most likely the urge to show your hand is driven by the hope that your opponent will show his as well, which again just give up on the idea of getting that kind of external confirmation. Play your hand as well as you can and be proud of that.

When Not to Hero Fold

Now on to the “play your hand as well as you can” bit. When I use the term “hero fold”, I mean to refer to exploitable folds. If your opponent knew you were folding a hand this strong to his river bet, he could print money by bluffing you. (This, by the way, is one of the reasons you shouldn’t make your hero folds face up.) If you fold to a pot-sized river bet with a hand that’s in the bottom half of your range, that’s not really a hero fold, it’s just a good fold.

So a hero fold, as I’m using the term, necessarily requires some kind of exploitable read on your opponent. You have to have good reason to believe that his betting range is excessively weighted towards hands better than yours. The amount of confidence you place in this read should be proportionate to the heroism of your fold. In other words, an inkling that your opponent is strong may be enough to make a slightly exploitable fold, but you should be much more certain before you fold the very top of your range.

Here’s an example of a hero fold I chose not to make for lack of a sufficiently strong read. It was a $1100 tournament, and the blinds were 100/200 without an ante. We were ten-handed, and the player in first position limped, as did a player in middle position. I was on the button with KQo and raised to 1000. I didn’t have much experience playing with these guys, but based on their appearance, what I knew about the field in general, and the half hour or so that we’d been playing together, they seemed loose, passive, and straight-forward. Everyone else folded, and the two limpers called.

The flop come 754 rainbow, and they both checked to me. I expected both players to have ranges weighted towards suited connectors and pocket pairs, so I checked behind. The turn was a Q that also put up a flush draw. The first player to act bet 1500 into a pot of 3300, the second player folded, and I called.

The river was a J, and my opponent bet 3000 into 6300. I wanted to fold. My opponent’s demeanor expressed confidence, and this doubling of the bet from one street to the next is often a sign of strength from recreational players.

Straight-forward players don’t make thin value bets on the river. They see the primary purpose of betting as protecting your hand, so once all of the cards are out they mostly just want to turn their cards over. There’s no way he was betting worse than a Q for value, and even QT or Q9 seemed unlikely, not to mention that he might not limp and call with those hands in the first place.

You’ll sometimes see river bets from a player like this as a blocking bet, that in that case I’d expect a smaller bet on the river, perhaps a “same bet”. It also wouldn’t explain the confidence in his demeanor, which I deemed to be genuine rather than an act.

If I’m right about that, then it really doesn’t matter that I have top pair with a good kicker. Either he’s bluffing, or I’m beat. Again, the confidence suggests he’s either not bluffing or a good actor. A player like this will usually bet bigger if he’s bluffing, and it’s rare to see him bluff into two people as he would have had to have done on the turn.

The problem was that all of this was based on a pretty tentative read, and if that was wrong, folding would be a big mistake. Getting better than 3:1 on the river, you’re supposed to call really often. Choosing instead to fold really often will be an expensive mistake if your opponent isn’t playing the way you think he is. So I paid him off, and he had a set of 5s.

A Heroic Fold

In light of the calls discussed so far, this hero fold might seem crazy. It was a $5/$10 cash game playing seven-handed and somewhat deep. The first player to act opened to $35 and was called by two very loose players, the second of whom could best be described as maniacally loose.

I was on the button with KQs and raised to $140. I was well ahead of the callers’ ranges, and I knew that the pre-flop raiser was capable of getting a little frisky with his opening standards. They all called, so with $575 in the pot we saw a Ks Qd Jd flop.

Everyond checked to me, and I bet $350. The original raiser now checked-raised to $1650, with about $250 behind. The other two folded.

This was not the result I wanted. The next player to act had only about $1300 in his stack, so I was prepared to get it in against him. The third player was the maniac, a guy who just the previous hand had cold-called a four-bet with 43s and then seriously considered calling two all-ins for quite a bit more, so I would have been happy enough to get it in against him.

The player who actually raised me, though, still had these two to act behind him, and he seemed pretty confident in his hand. I commented that he’d made a big raise, and he shrugged and said, “It’s only only 14 chips. Oh did you mean monetarily? Yes, I suppose it’s a big raise. I left myself room to fold though.”

I’d recently been reading an early manuscript of Zach Ellwood’s new book, which deals with verbal tells in poker, so I was especially keyed in to the significance of this kind of banter. His relaxation and willingness to joke around suggest genuine confidence and strength. There’s no way he was on a pure bluff, and the confidence seemed to rule out even the combo draws that might go for a big semi-bluff.

My primary concern was whether he could exude this sort of confidence with a worse made hand. I figured he was good enough not to lose his mind with AK, but what about QJ or KJ? Even then, could he really feel that confident if I was considering calling him? My pre-flop re-raise was perfectly consistent with KK, QQ, or JJ, in fact I’d just shown down KK in the previous hand after making a very similar raise.

That also means that KQ isn’t really as close to the top of my range as it may seem. I have nine combinations of sets, and a few combinations of ATs, and arguably even some combo draws should go into my calling range before KQ.

So a fold didn’t seem like it would be wildly exploitable, and unlike in the previous hand I had not just a hunch but a pretty strong verbal tell that my opponent was confident in his hand. I folded, face down of course.