...well, I did my math too, and I still don't agree with it =) Damn I must be looking realllly stupid here arguing with guy who writes books.. I honestly do not like people like that, but let's look a bit at what I see.
I specially stated that the addition of your own bet is to get the odds right in PERCENT (%).
Lets say my chances of winning are 25% (1 out of every 4 times).
The pot is 100$ and opp. bets 50$
The pot is now 150$
So you say it's 150 pot and I have to bet 50 then it means I have to bet 30% of the pot and my chances are 25% so I shouldn't call, right?. As my chances of winning are smaller than the chances of pot so I will lose. But as dogmeat said actually we ar getting EVEN here. 1 time I win 150 and 3 times I lose 50 (1 out of 4 = 25%). But if we look at 30% and 25% it surely doesn't look even, now does it???
So in order to get it even in percent and to get the real situation we DO ADD our own bet to the pot.
So the pot would now be 200 and I have to bet 50 to get in, and that is 25%, and my chances of wining are 25%, now this looks even, and I know for sure that I will get even.
Now lets see another example:
My chances of wining are 40% (40 times out of 100)
The pot is 100$ opp bets 100$ = total pot is now 200$
I have to call 100$ to get in, so as you say I have to bet 50% to get in, but my chances are just 40% so I have to fold.
If I do add my own bet to the pot it turns out that I have to bet only 30% to get in, and my chances are 40%...and If we calculate we get = 40 times out of 100 I'll win 200$ = 8000$ and 60 times out of 100 I'll lose 100$ = 6000$. So actually I get a good profit.
I know, that if we just look at the numbers 200$ pot and 100$ bet and 40% chance we can calculate this at the begining and see that we are profitable, but we get 50% pot odds against 40% of wining if we do not add our own bet to the pot, and that is a bit confusing, especially when we have to calculate this every hand and we want to get it done and right more quickly.
So why would i want to calculate all this every hand??? The numbers above are pretty, but they may be way worse just to quickly get the calculation done. So I just add twice the opp. bet to the current pot and get the idea of how much % the bet is out of the pot and compare it to my chances of winning. And if the pot odds in % are now bigger than my chances of winning I KNOW FOR SURE I will lose money over long term. So I do not have to calculate all those numbers to get the exact EV and see if it really is or isn't profitably to call.
So this adding thing as I already stated in the first post (about this) is just to get the PERCENTAGES right.
Now please tell me what You think? Does this make sense? I think it does. I know this all boils down to the same result, but it is the question of perception and ease of estimation. Some people are better of with those 1:3 or 1/4. I'm not, I'm better of with %, and that is why I didn't want to believe that all those sites out there were publishing BS.