Increase/Decrease Fold Equity

Originally Posted by Tasha

How does fold equity change as the street are played out? In particular I'm asking here about fold equity when you go all-in.
There seems to be two ways of looking at it.
On the one hand fold equity goes up with each street because Villain has less and less chance to complete his draw.
On the other hand, fold equity might be going down because perhaps he has improved his hand. Or is it Villain dependent (which seems to me to be a bit of a cop out answer)?
At what point is fold equity at its lowest? Preflop, or after the flop?

I don't think you really get it.

It's not about which street, it's about the hand villain has and the range he puts you on, which we interpret thought the range we put villan on against the range we estimate he puts you on.

For example, if you have a very tight image and a laggy player ends up 3 betting you preflop & you shove, you probably have a large amount of fold equity as villans range is wide and yours is pretty narrow.

However, if you call from utg in a multiway pot and 2 hearts flop, and you then call bets on the flop and turn and the river is a heart, you would often have a lot of fold equity here too.

The street is irrelevent, it's purely a range vs range estimation at any point where you are thinking of betting.

Tasha, chapter 3 of "Easy Game" has a pretty good introduction on fold equity and how it can be practically applied to game situations, as well as a detail of what factors it primarily depends on. The posts above are spot on, obviously, but if you'd like to be properly acquainted to the topic I suggest reading it.

I may or may not have .pdfs of this book, which I may or may not give you if you decided to log in to IRC with us.... hint hint