Sergio Mora

Throwing your hand away, otherwise known as folding, is a very important aspect of poker playing. In fact, a successful, prudent, and well-executed fold can allow you to win quite a lot of money that’s comparable to actually playing a winning hand. You can go forth and fold repeatedly in a given session, and it wouldn’t matter because in exchange, you can make a pretty penny using that tactic. Folding is a secret art that allows you to earn your opponent’s money by increments without risking too much by actually playing your hand. You can just keep throwing your hand away, and you wouldn’t mind because you would then carry the money away, and your opponents wouldn’t mind.

The Virtue of Folding

In many ways, folding is an exciting proposition. Competitive poker players would often rather find a way to actually one-up opponents by getting good hands and playing them, but there’s a certain virtue in opting out instead. Discretion, after all, is the better part of valor. You can fold a flop when someone does a raise. You can fold eight-queen suited. You can fold a couple of times before the flop with ten-nine. You can get carried away with this and even fold on the river when you have a good hand. The funny thing about that is that you can probably get away with that, earning a decent amount without necessarily risking it all.

Folding, just like playing on Full Tilt Poker, is just one of the many ways you can make money out of this game of chance, with the added caveat of reducing the chances of bad beats or being eaten alive by superior poker sharks out there. Of course, any regular poker enthusiast is aware of the importance of folding, and in fact it’s an essential part of a player’s repertoire. However, folding is such an effective strategy that it can arguably be taken to the logical extreme, which is folding that is done audaciously, conspicuously, and without much fanfare.

Folding brings about a Tight Game

Just like an overly defensive tactic employed in basketball (defending instead of scoring) and boxing (counterpunching instead of aggressively attacking), a folding-dominant poker game is an acquired taste, to say the least. Nevertheless, there’s the added advantage of having a tight, clamshell-like game with the only downside of not winning as much as you should be winning were you willing to take more risks. Potential “folders” should learn to become quite complacent and comfortable with all the potential backtalk, complaints, and ridicule as they sit back on their chair and muck time and time again.

Folding can make you actually feel like some sort of puppet master, because by cruising along the pace of the game without making an effort to read expected values, the math behind the situation, the bluffs of an opponent, and the decisions of others, you’ll still manage to win quite a bit. Granted, you still need a modicum of knowledge of all of the above in order to make your folding shenanigans work (sometimes your fold can get a bit complicated, like if you raise a poker star flop and someone reraises behind you and everyone else folds and you call and the flop and you check and he bets, and then you fold), but avoiding the risk of having your bluff called or the trouble of deciding whether you should play a hand or not are rewards unto themselves.