How to Minimize Your Loss With a Fold

Most poker players will overlook the small parts of their game during a poker session, but if you want to be the best, you have to play like the best. The best players in the world have all made millions of dollars and also saved millions of dollars by having the fold in their arsenal. Sometimes folding is incorrect and sometimes folding is correct. What makes the best players in the world the best is they know when to do which and what to do in certain scenarios. When you fold a hand you are losing the pot, and you should be alright with that because if you don’t have the best hand, sometimes you aren’t going to win. Also, you cannot try to win every pot because eventually you will get caught bluffing and lose all of your chips. The best scenario for you is sometimes to muck a hand and sometimes to make that painful fold. If you can make that painful fold, and you are right then you are doing your job well, if you are a professional poker player. Those painful folds and wonder of what a player has sometimes drives you to become great, so when you are in that situation again you will realize that it isn’t so much as a painful fold, but a necessary fold.

Some spots that have come up often when relating to online poker are when you put in a three bet before the flop with a hand like AQ and the player instantly moves all in. A hand like AQ is very easily beaten when playing cash games or tournaments. In both forms of the game you can be crushed by a wide range of hands or at best be in a race situation. This is clearly what you don’t want and is one instance where folding to minimize loss is crucial for long term success. These hands like AQ are trap hands because you can get four bet shoved on and have no clue what your opponent is holding. You really will not know until you have played enough where you can see where AQ is the best hand and where AQ is not the best hand. So many players make the mistake of 5 betting with AQ or calling off shoves. In a cash game, you will not see good regular players stack off with less than middle pocket pairs or AQ or AK, you just will not see it. If you are calling with AQ, this means that you have identified the player as a fish, and you are reading the player over reading the play itself. In some scenarios and most of the time you should do this against poor players. Players who don’t play well may just go all in with AA before the flop because they just want to win the pot. When you sit down to play poker though you have to do just that, and forget about everything that happened previously.

Folding is the hardest thing for even some of the best players in the world to do on a regular occasion, but you should see how important it can be relating to long term success. If you track a cash game graph throughout a 100,000 hands of play, you should see a steady increase in profit throughout the 100k hands of play. If you see break even play you should go back in and analyze certain tendencies that you have. One important part of cash game poker especially is to not pay off opponents on the river. If someone has three bet before the flop, bet the flop, bet the turn, and now shoved the river, you should realize that you are probably beat way more times than you are beating your opponent. The idea of winning every hand is inconceivable and the idea of winning every single day is also not possible by any means, but if you minimize the amount you lose in certain hands it could turn a break even poker player into a winning poker player. After all of the agony of losing, you should never look to be a losing poker player. To be great you have to be a winner, and to get there you have to know when to hang on to your hands and know when to throw away your hands.