Folding
http://tommyangelo.com/articles/folding.htm
I played poker for ten years before I discovered folding in 1984. That's when I met Bobby. He had a big belly, a big beard, and a big laugh. Bobby was like Santa Claus, minus the giving. He just kept throwing his hand away, and he didn't seem to mind. Then he would carry the money away, and the players didn't seem to mind.
So I started folding more often, to see what would happen. I folded before the
flop with ten-nine a couple times. I folded queen-eight
suited. I folded an ace when somebody raised. It was so new, so exciting. I was high from it, like an explorer. I kept adding more hands not to play, trying to get my starting-hand folding rate up with Bobby's. But it didn't stop there. Oh no. Before long I got hooked on the hard stuff, like folding on the
river when I had a good hand.
Soon I went to Vegas. After a week in the desert, I
felt like Charles Darwin must have
felt on the Galapagos Islands, having traveled to an isolated land, where he found strange new ecosystems populated by bizarre species. What I discovered on Las Vegas Island was that in the poker ecosystem, at the
top of the food chain, sat the folders.
I need to stop here and
tell you exactly the kind of folding I mean. I'
m talking about folding that is done often, and conspicuously, and audaciously, and without a fuss.
Every now and then in the Vegas games, a non-folder would say something to a folder, sometimes friendly sometimes not, about playing so
tight. I couldn't get over how comfortable the folders were, with all of it, with the folding, with the comments, and they'd just sit there
behind their tall stacks and long smiles, and
muck, one more time.
I was like, okay, I see how this works now. It's like a club. The folders club.
Well, whatever it was, I wanted in.
After my first taste of big-time folding, I
felt that if I could get really good at it, I could quit my job. So I made folding my holy grail, my quest, my mountain to climb. I could see the mountain. I could see my path. I looked at the ground in front of me, and I took a step.
By 1990 I was folding enough to support my food and rent habit. This freed up lots of time for lots more folding. Before long I got so good at folding that I could afford to get stupid at first one flavor of gambling then another and another. My tether
line to solvency was always the folding. Anytime I was low on money, all I had to do was stop betting and stop eating and get
back to the folding.
Eventually I outpaced the gamble demon and the cigarette demon and the
tilt demon and several others I met along the way. My path became a gentle incline that coaxed me up to a sunny ledge where I stopped, and sat, and I looked around in wonder, for I could see the
top of the mountain far away and high above, and I could see the bottom, waiting for me, should I neglect my folding.
When I play now, in 2006, one of the things I
don't do during the opening drive of the game is
wager much. I like to get to the folding right away. My ideal
session starts with a sip of coffee, then somebody raises and I
fold from the
big blind, then another little sip before I
fold my
small blind, then I take as big a sip as the coffee's temperature will allow, and I sit up
straight, and I get ready to play my
button, and I exhale consciously, and most likely
fold.
Which brings me to the hand that got me to writing about my folding fetish in the first place.
The game was
brick-and-mortar $80-160 limit hold'em. It was my first hand of the
session. I was in the
big blind with ace-ten
offsuit and no hearts. One player limped, the
small blind folded, and I checked. We were headsup going into the
flop with me first.
The
flop came ace, ace, nine, with two hearts.
I checked. He checked.
The
turn was the eight of hearts.
I checked. He checked.
The
river was the seven of hearts, making the final board A-A-9, 8, 7, with four hearts.
I checked. He bet. And I folded.
Of course no one at the table had any idea I had a hand like that. After all, all that happened was
limp,
check --
check,
check --
check,
check --
check, bet,
fold. If any of my opponents were to
draw a conclusion from what they had seen, it would not be that I had folded a good hand. It would be that I had chosen to not
bluff, three times, with a bad one. And that's why I
fold the way I do, with a quiet mind and a silent body, so nobody knows what I had.
Sometimes folding makes me feel like a puppet master. Like when I openraise from the cutoff with not much, and the
button calls and the blinds
fold, and it's headsup with me first, and I
miss the flop, and I
check and he bets and I
fold. Or if I
raise before the
flop and someone reraises
behind me and everyone else is out and I
call and the
flop comes and I
check and he bets and I
fold. With punts like these, I make money twice. Once by immediately ending my worst situations. Twice by making it correct, in their worlds, for the bluffing types to
bluff when I
check, and for the folding types to
fold when I bet. And all of a sudden, I can't lose. I love folding.
© 2006 tommy angelo
Must read over and over for all us beginners!
Originally Posted by XxStacksxX
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