The fact that even an unknown opponent made even a single fold is actually very powerful information. If you know opponent's range of hands he plays, it's even more powerful. If you assume a more stable raising strategy of only coming in for a raise with the best 1/9 hands (1st to act 9 handed) and you rank them in a certain way you still have an assumption that can give you more information than not. For example, the probability that your opponent folds a 2 is higher than the probability that he folds an ace. So much so in fact that you can effectively say there are less than the full 4 set of twos in the deck. You instead might approximate there are 3.75 2's in the deck and 3.95 aces in the deck after a single fold. Add in consecutive folds and it is extremely powerful information.
As a result, after 8 people fold, the chances of the big blind having pocket aces is greater. At the same time, the hand strength of low suited connectors vs a random hand goes down while the hand of ace king goes way up. The chances of him having any ace are greater so a low ace suited is not as good. AT is probably about the same, ace jack is probably slightly stronger, and ace queen and ace king are much stronger.. That information is so much of an advantage that if you have ace king you go from being a dog in a standard heads up game to a favorite over even a mid pair. Better yet is there is more likely to either be an ace or king in your opponent's hand (in which case you have him dominated), and more likely that an ace or king comes on the flop (which also plays in your favor). This not only changes hand strength, but also what constitutes "equilibrium" strategy in poker for everything to pushing ranges preflop to postflop drawing strategies. This information can become a huge edge. You can more accurately determine what cards will come on the flop and even after the flop. Learn to compute this kind of stuff in a spreadsheet, and you will know things that others do not, and be able to adjust accordingly.
Unfortunately it is a lot of work. You can either assume hand ranges, or learn to do some kind of Monte Carlo simulation. I will try to come up with one an instructions how to do it. I have not yet done the work myself.
There are many ways to approach the same problem. I want to use a montecarlo simulation rather than trying to map out all permutations and calculate raw specific probabilities.
I want to assume specific hand ranges that the opponents will play even if this may be an erroneous assumption it still will be closer to the truth than assuming they fold randomly.
To do this I need to approach everything separately. For example, rather than just look at the hand ranges for everyone as the same, I must isolate it, calculate the probability that it will fold to a particular person and given that, determine what percentage of the time the person it has folded to has a particular card. Each card 2 through A will have to be looked at individually. For now suitedness doesn't matter since I am not looking at probability of exact cards, although down the road I may wish I had put all 2652 2 card combinations of deals in there.
In the future I will work towards constructing a spreadsheet that can more accurately make calculations.
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