|
I don't consider money that I've put in the pot as lost. It's an investment. There's a critical difference. If you put a pound in a fruit machine, you've just lost 25p or whatever. The money you put into a pot is no longer yours, but it's still significant because you need to be happy that the money you put in will return you a profit.
As for calling pocket pairs to setmine, there's plenty of talk about this in the stickies. I'll try to run through the basics here...
First of all, you need to know the probability of hitting your set. Well that's around 1 in 9. Obviously that means you can expect to be c/f'ing 8 times out of 9 when you face a cbet. That means that 8x the call is immediately lost, meaning you need to be winning at least this back as an average when you do hit you set, otherwise you're leaking. But of course this assumes that a set always wins. Of course it doesn't. How often your set wins and how often you get paid off enough depends on villain's range... the tighter the better. He's not paying a set off with ace high, for example. So you need to be winning more than 9x your pre flop call, quite a bit more in fact.
As a bare minimum, you should be looking to win 14x your investment with a set. This allows some breathing space for villain folds and coolers. But if villain is loose, then you should look to win more, because all too often villain will bet flop and then fold to your raise, or stop betting if you call, limiting your win, meaning you'll need more from the top of his range to balance out your average to ensure it remains above 9x pf investment.
The problem you have is if you're not full stacked, then winning big pots with a set is a lot harder, simply because doubling up is not winning as much as it should be.
When you get dealt a small pair, the first thing you should be doing is looking at your stack, and looking at the stacks of those left in the hand. How much can you win if you hit the flop? Is it 14x more than the call? That's your baseline, which you then adjust according to villains left to act.
Basically, setmining without a full stack is a huge leak. Even if you're making money somehow, you would be winning more fullstacked.
|