[Zag]

This hand brings up an interesting point about implied odds. You said that you felt you had the implied odds to call the $3 preflop, because you stood to win, say $60 (villain doubles you up, plus some dead money). Therefore, you are saying that at least one flop in 20 will be good enough for you to guarantee taking his stack, and on all the rest, you have no risk. Unfortunately, there is risk on almost all the favorable flops -- only 444 and 777 are close enough to risk-free. You have to take into account the reverse implied odds as well as the implied odds -- the chance that you will lose your whole stack, as well.

As it turned out, you got what you considered to be a favorable flop, but was it really? As the cards stood, you were only a 56-to-44 favorite. With the bets as they were, if you played this flop out 100 times, you win an average of $23 per hand. If someone had said to you preflop, as you were considering making the $3 call, "IF you get a favorable flop, you can expect to profit by $20," would you still make the call? Do you really think that you will see a "favorable" flop more often than 1 in 7?

(If we give him the Kd as one of his kings, you are only 515 to 485 ahead. If we give him the Ad Kd instead of a big pair, you are way behind on this "favorable" flop.)

Even on a much more favorable flop, like J74, you are still only a 3-to-1 favorite, so you should only count half the winnings for the times that you win, in order to compensate for the times you lose. That is, with what is really your best reasonable flop, you only stood to win (on average) $35. And you can't tell that flop from K74, in which you are a 20-to-1 dog against KK.

I think that, in order to make the call preflop, you had to be a lot deeper, like 300 BBs rather than 100, or 60 times the amount of the call, rather than 18. Also, you need to know that your opponent will pay off on nearly all the big hands you have, or else you have to have some significant bluff equity, which means he is tight, capable of a laydown, and you have a very tight image. And you have to know which of these two types of players you are up against in order to know the right way to play postflop.