When to fold?

The question of when to fold (passing on your hand and giving up the pot) ought to be the most asked question at the table, and in practice it is the least asked. Money you do not lose counts exactly as much as money you win. Only a good fold never feels like winning: no pot comes your way, no card proves you right, only the quiet certainty that you skipped a mistake. That is where it goes wrong, because without that reward most players call themselves slowly poor.

Preflop: the easiest folds

By far the most profit from folding comes before the flop. A mediocre starting hand from early position, a pretty face cards hand against a big raise, a hand you only play because you are bored: all folds. Bear in mind that at a full table you get the best cards only once in nine hands, so folding a lot is not a sign of weakness but the normal state of good play. Stick to a fixed list of starting hands per position and you spare yourself the awkward decisions that would otherwise follow on the flop and turn. Every preflop fold costs you at most a blind or a small call, while the same hand played on can easily cost half a stack. Discipline is never cheaper than it is here.

The sum: price against chance of winning

After the flop, folding is no longer a matter of feeling but a sum. Compare what the call costs with what is in the pot, and set that against your chance of making the best hand. If you pay a quarter of the pot while your chance of winning is below twenty percent, folding is simply the profitable choice. How to make that comparison in seconds you can read in calculating pot odds. Without this sum every call is a gamble, with it folding is just bookkeeping. The nice thing is that after a few weeks of practice the sum becomes automatic: you feel straight away whether a price is right, and the fold that used to hurt becomes routine.

Signals that you are beaten

Some folds follow not from the sum but from the story of the hand. A passive player who suddenly bets big on the river almost always has what he says he has at low stakes, because players who check and call for an hour rarely discover their inner maniac at that one moment. A raise on a board where the flush or the straight has come in is rarely a joke either. One pair, however pretty, is usually not a hand to pay three big bets with. Pay more attention to how the hand ran than to your own cards: who checked, who suddenly woke up, which card changed the story. Believe the signal, not your hope.

The trap: money already in the pot

The most expensive thinking mistake in poker: "I have to call now, there is already so much of mine in the pot". That money is not yours any more, it belongs to the pot. The only question that counts is whether the next call is profitable with the cards and the price of this moment. Anyone who consistently looks at it that way folds more often on the turn and river than before, and sees it back in the figures. Help yourself with a simple habit: at every call, ask out loud which worse hands are still betting here. If the answer stays empty, you have found your fold. You rarely recognise good players by their hero calls and almost always by their calm, timely folds, because they know that tomorrow's pot is paid for with the money you do not burn today.