I guess I've just come into contact with poor implementations of the rule of 4 then - I thought it made more sense to just apply rule of 2 on the turn bet, and you've all just confirmed that. Thanks
--edit--
I'm still unsure why you only take into account the amount of the bet you're making on that round of betting when calculating pot odds though. In my example we're at 12.5 bb going into the turn. If he bets 2 bb, then standard advice says I have a 12.1% break-even threshold if I call (2 bb / 16.5 bb - 7.25:1 odds) and 16% equity (8 outs, rule of 2, 6.25:1 odds) so I should call. But even if I hit the nut straight, I still look at the numbers and see it, without a further value bet, as making 10.5 bb profit 16% of the time and losing 6 bb the other 84%, giving an expected outcome of -3.36 bb.
Sure, this is where implied odds comes into play, but I still can't help looking at the situation and thinking that actually I'm looking at this particular bet resulting in a total investment of 6 bb (my 4 bb from pre-flop and the 2 bb needed to call on the turn) compared to the pot of 16.5 bb and thus I have 1.75:1 pot odds, with a break even threshold of 36.4%. I'm finding it difficult to understand how the bet is profitable at that point in time, without factoring in the implied odds of future value bets. My expected outcome over 100 hands would be a profit of 10.5, 16 times, and a loss of 6, 84 times. 16*10.5=168, 84*6=504, average expected outcome is -3.36 bb for every time I play the hand.
Yes, if I fold then I will be down 4 bb every time, so playing the hand is more profitable than folding, but it seems that the result is that simply by playing the hand (remember it was KQ offsuit, which is hardly a marginal hand) I put myself in a lose-lose situation. Clearly people do make money playing poker, employing rules and techniques such as these, and indeed they've been helping me since I adopted them, but I'm struggling to wrap my head around how and why the numbers play out the way they do.
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