Bets/Folds/Calls - which are the most important to get right?
Dara O'Kearney breaks down whether calling mistakes, betting mistakes or folding mistakes are costing you the most money.
In my new book on ICM one of the more groundbreaking chapters is called 'Some mistakes are bigger than others' where we establish a pecking order for what the biggest errors you can make are - betting errors, calling errors and folding errors.
We know a bad fold, a bad call and a bad bet can all cost you money, but which is worse?
Spoiler alert, specifically in the context of ICM, calling with the wrong range will cost you the most money.
Using solvers we delve much further into this in the book, why it is and specifically how much it costs you, but it's the sort of thing we can also explain in a simpler way.
Calling mistakes cost you the most
Betting or raising incorrectly is the least costly mistake, because it can still work out well if everyone overfolds. You won't lose much equity with a bad bet if you are close to the correct range.
Folding mistakes are an opportunity cost, you still have the same stack size and equity at the end of them, you missed out rather than lost something. Folding mistakes are somewhere in the middle between betting mistakes and calling mistakes.
A calling mistake costs you the most, especially when it is all-in, because you have to have the best hand and you lose your entire stack when you are wrong.
Folding is just an opportunity cost
The biggest mistake by far can be calling. Calling mistakes are massive. Let's say ATs should be a fold and AJs should be a call. Calling ATs will cost you a lot, folding AJs will cost you very little, in terms of equity. We delve into the maths of this deeply in the new book.
It also depends on the type of tournament you are in to determine how costly these errors are. If I am in a soft tournament, I don't mind making a fold I know is slightly bad. I'll make tight folds to lower variance and look for more profitable spots.
If I am at a table of absolute crushers, I'm more likely to take whatever minorly profitable call I can, because it's not going to get much better for me.
Calling the best hand you are supposed to fold is usually a much bigger mistake than folding the worst hand you are supposed to call. Therefore, you should study call ranges as your priority if you want to improve as a player.
Dara O'Kearney's new book Endgame Poker Strategy: The ICM Book is out now.
