Two Plus Two Older Archives - This Hand Got Ugly Quick

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I was hoping to get two other people to come along (making the pot 7.5 bets not including the 2 that I'm calling) to play a four-handed, raised pot with 1.5 SB of dead money in it. It almost worked out like that but not quite. I agree about folding to the flop 3-bet.

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Here's the problem.

Unless I'm mistaken, three or four-handed is the worst possible case for a mid to small pocket pair. You lack the implied odds to flop a set (really, you do!), yet there's enough seeing the flop to reasonably assume that you're behind if you don't. You're hoping for this worst-case scenario.

You're 7:1 or so to hit your set. since you're paying 2SB to see the flop (we hope!) you need 14SB to make this a decent call--actually make that about 18-20SB to account for the 20% of the time or so we make our set and lose (and we'll lose a lot since we'll be going to war), as well as the rake. There could be anywhere from 3SB to 6SB by the flop depending on if they call. Can we make up 6-9BB by the river if we hit? My spidey sense says no--while it's possible the flop could hit us and others and spark a war, in my experience it's not as likely as us raising the flop and getting 4BB or so from the PFR.

If you really want to continue this hand for some reason, my advice is to three-bet preflop. You'll likely get rid of the blind and the poster, making you heads up and giving you a slight advantage if he has overcards. On top of that you'll find out how likely it is he actually has OCs--if he caps and leads an undercard flop you're probably sunk.

Not saying I'd advocate a 3-bet preflop here as we have little in the way of PFR reads on the guy--if he was smart enough to isolate the poster I'd say go for it but it looks like he's not.