Need a little help with my maths as I played a hand recently online but think I made a bad play. This is all from memory so the specifics may not be 100%

If anyone could confirm or criticise my thinking and/or correct my maths that would be appreciated.


5NL
6- Max
Hero - HJ 100bb
Villain 1 - SB 100bb (Reg)
Villain 2 - BB 60bb (passive fish)

I raise 3bb from the HJ with 66, folds round to the SB who 3bets to 12bb. The big blind then cold calls the remaining 11bbs. It’s back on me and without much thought I folded to what was most likely at least one hand that dominated my own.

But ... I had to put in 9bb to win a pot that would of been 35bb, pot odds of about 26% or 4/1
Not good enough for a set mine. But let’s say I could extract another 40bb on average, would I then add 40bb of villains + 40bb of my own to 35bb? Which gives 9/115 = 0.08 or slightly better than 10/1 pot odds?

Hence a profitable set mine ?

Annoyingly I would of flopped set in this case.
Sb continued and BB folded.

You made a wrong play here because of implied odds. As you have noticed you only need one pot size bet to be profitable call and by the way hand played preflop at least one villain had bigger pair that can pay you on most flops. So call here and if you do not hit set you're done with the hand

Adding 9 more BB to a pot of 27 or 30BB is 3 to 1 odds. You are 12% to flop a set and you have position. I would normally call in this situation. If you miss the flop, you are last to act. Not a bad situation to be in.

Jarud, you are making a mathematical mistake when calculating your pot odds. Do not include your call as part of the pot that you expect to win. Preflop, you had to call 9bb to win what was in the pot, which was 27bb, not 35.
You're right that you are not getting the correct immediate odds against an over-pair, but if you think that you can get paid when you hit a set, it is definitely correct to call.
Hope this helps. Good luck!

Also, it doesn't matter that you would have flopped a set. You have to make the best decision in the moment, based on the information available to you. The actual cards that come on the flop are irrelevant to your preflop decision.

Having dealt a pocket pair, there is 11% probability to catch trips or better at the flop, meaning, the nuts. That much I can tell about pre-flop probabilities.

Your position is key here. Everyone to act after you has folded, so you have absolute position for the rest of the hand. This means you will have a lot more information when you come to act than your opponents do. I would call here, knowing that I can let my hand go easily if I don't improve, but if I hit my set, I'm normally going to be able to extract value and therefore the long term winning play is to call pre-flop.