How can I expect to make money in this situation?
Every time you act, ask yourself the question. To respond, assess both of your stocks.
As previously stated, every hand scenario contains two major components of value: showdown equity and steal equity. A hand is worth playing when the sum of these two components outweighs the risk involved. You fold 72 preflop because, while the hand contains both showdown and steal equity, it lacks sufficient value to justify the risk.
Before you play a hand, consider why you’re playing it. Are you relying mostly on your ability to make the best hand, as you would with large pocket pairs? Or do you need to steal repeatedly to make the hand profitable, just as a little suited hand on the button?
Few hands may be played exclusively to produce the best hand. One typical mistake that many players make is focusing too narrowly on showdown equity with hands like suited connectors, small suited aces, and other speculative hands. With these hands, they look for a cheap flop and hope to capture a monster. If they miss, they usually stop attempting to steal. They simply fold.
Unfortunately, these speculative hands do not interact with the board frequently enough to provide good showdown equity. Unless your opponents are extraordinarily loose, these hands rely on steal equity to be successful. If you won’t make much money from stealing, your default strategy should be to fold them.
If your hand is heavily reliant on theft, keep this in mind as you move forward. This does not imply that you should strive to steal every time. However, if you do not take advantage of steal opportunities, you will turn a good hand into an unprofitable one.
If your hand is heavily reliant on showdown equity, keep in mind that not all of these hands function similarly. Contrast KT with 44. With KT, you’ll usually create medium-strength pairs. To make the hand lucrative, you must extract one or two bets from weaker hands while not paying off superior ones. With 44, you will rarely make monster hands. To make the hand profitable, you must persuade your opponents to pay you off the few times you hit your hand. Thus, even though both hands rely on showdown equity, they will profit in distinct situations and require different strategies.
Assume you open for a raise on the button with T♣ 8♠ in a 100bb $1-$2 game. T♣ 8♠ rarely produces a nice hand. You rely heavily on theft to keep the hand lucrative. So you decide to make a scheme around stealing. Where will your stolen profits come from? You could either win the blinds outright or steal the pot after the turn. Before you play a hand to steal, think about where your steal equity will come from. Do you just hope to steal the blinds frequently enough to profit? Do you rely on many postflop steals to supplement your blind steals? Before you put a single chip in the pot, you should have a general understanding of how frequently and at what moments in the hand you need to steal to turn a profit.
Remember the questions you should ask yourself when making every decision: How can I expect to make money in this situation? What’s my showdown equity? What is my stolen equity? Which one is more likely to make me money? And how should I organize my play to maximize the equity I have?
