[jtr]

Hey, Vanquish.

Glad you got some useful answers to your question. As for how to decide, in the heat of battle, whether you have the odds to call, you should start thinking of the pot in terms of its size in bets, not dollars. (This is especially important in live play, where there is no handy pot size measure displayed on the screen!) So, for example, let's say you're playing 2/4. You note that there are $20 in the pot at the end of the flop betting. That's 10 small bets. Now we move to the big bet streets, so divide by 2. We have 5 big bets in that pot. One guy bets (+1 BB), he gets a caller (+1 BB again), and then it's your turn. If you've been thinking about the number of bets going in, it's easy to see that the pot is offering you 7:1 on your call. If you needed, I don't know, call it 10.5:1 for a gutshot draw, you could happily fold knowing you weren't getting the odds.

So in my opinion, there's no need to multiply the odds you require by the bet size to get a minimum pot size for calling, although you could certainly do it this way if you want. If you train yourself to always think "that's a 7BB pot", "that's a 14.5BB pot", etc., then thinking about whether you have odds to call at X:1 becomes very easy.