Folding a big hand in poker

Victoria Coren's article Yesterday in the guardian recounts how she had the shoe straight and folded.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2010/aug/11/victoria-coren-poker

The point of the article is that not knowing if she did the right thing still haunts her. Now to be a good poker player you have to occasionally fold a big hand. With large televised events there is the chance that you will find out if you did the right thing as you might get to see your opponents cards.

You could try asking - but this will rarely get the response that you wanted. So how should you handle these situations?

The problem is that she has disguised her hand. This is a good thing but it makes it very difficult to read your opponent. They think that they have the better hand and this is shown by their body language. At best you might see that they are unsure.

Now you are in a position where your opponent is unlikely to fold to further raises and you don't want to be involved in the hand due to the range of hands you put your opponent on. So you decide to fold. This is the critical moment, you should now act as if you had been bluffing with nothing.

This helps for two reasons:
1) it makes it more difficult for people to read you
2) It puts you in a better frame of mind for folding

The problem is if you show a fantastic fold the players who are not good enough to beat you will think that you are showing weakness. You will then be bullied by the other stacks.

I will come back to this hand shortly and give the example of mine that was very similar to this, that I didn't handle well.

A final note is if at the point of the flop the other player has flopped a set then they win with any pair.

With 876 this leaves 7 outs on the turn and a further 10 on the river ~38% but the danger hand was the
10 9.