If you are a consumer of poker content and you haven't spent the last two years under a rock, you will have heard of Hungry Horse Poker.
Co-founded by professional players Marc Goone and Gethen Jacobs, Hungry Horse has built a huge following (over 200K subscribers on YouTube). If you're playing live cash no-limit hold'em and a flop comes down J-9-2 with two of a suit, you almost expect somebody to say, "Look at that sweet baby there."
By way of transparency: I am a Hungry Horse disciple. I discovered them over two and a half years ago and immediately thought: "This is the truth, right here." I won't go into detail – you can get that on the YouTube review I did of their training. I am an active member of the HHP community and love the connections I've made through it.
But no relationship is perfect, and there's one thing Hungry Horse does that tilts me out of my skull. Since I care, I'm going to bring it up right here in public.
There's no such thing as 'too much fold equity'
Hungry Horse training material is filled with references to 'too much fold equity.' This is a meaningless phrase. Equity means 'your share of something.' Consider the two relevant definitions of 'equity' (taken from the Oxford/Google dictionary):
- 'The value of the shares issued by a company.' If you are a stockholder in a company, your shares represent equity in that company. More equity means you have a larger percentage of the total company pie.
- 'The value of a mortgaged property after deduction of charges against it.' If you have a house worth $600K and a $200K mortgage, you have $400K equity in that house. As your mortgage goes down, your equity goes up.
What is 'fold equity'?
The term 'fold equity' arose in the early Moneymaker days, as NLHE ascended in popularity. It means the extra equity in the pot that you gain by getting your opponent(s) to fold. Here are some places where it’s defined:
- PokerCode
- Upswing
- Wikipedia – this entry is quite articulate and concise on the subject. It contains the following formula in the first paragraph:
Fold Equity = (likelihood that opponent folds) * (gain in equity if opponent(s) fold)
The HHP usage completely contorts the definition, and uses it in such a way that you could have 'too much equity in Juniper Networks' or 'too small a mortgage.' How to fix the usage? Simple. Use 'fold equity' to mean what it has always meant: a gain in equity that you get from opponent(s) folding. In a spot where you don’t want folds, say, “Check-raising here generates too much fold equity causes too many folds.”
Many of today's players have little or no fundamental poker grounding
Why the rant, Lee? Am I making a mountain out of a molehill? You say 'courgette,' I say 'zucchini' – whatever.
Well, no.
I have (finally) realized that many younger players have come to poker directly through YouTube and similar portals. Their entire poker worldview is no-limit hold'em, as seen through the video camera lens. They can discuss correct out-of-position 3-betting ranges, but don't know how to compute a theoretically accurate river bluffing frequency.
Poker is hard enough when we get the grammar and semantics right. Sloppy vocabulary only increases the difficulty and adds to confusion.
I spend a lot of time in the Hungry Horse Discord group, and I hate seeing the newer members talk about 'too much fold equity.'
But why shouldn't they? The smartest people in the room (e.g. Marc and Gethen) are using the phrase – it must be correct. But it's not correct, and with the continued spread of the Hungry Horse message, there's a real danger of 'too much fold equity' being baked into the poker vernacular. Just like "Sevens are running hot today."
I'll finish where I started: for my money, Hungry Horse Poker is the best live cash poker coaching there is. I simply want them to drop this 'too much fold equity' phrase before it infects a whole generation of new players.
