How do you make the most out of equity?

[Stealthy]

From my first read of SSHE to my regular readings of this forum I here a ton about having an edge in equity with certain hands. Most are obvious. AA KK etc also on the flop it can be clear. A hand I had earlier I called a raise from the CO and saw a 3 way pot with 87 suited, I flopped a pair of 7s a gutshot and flush draw. I was happy to cap the flop with the pre-flop raisor who I correctly put on an overpair as my equity edge was huge with 3 in.

What I don't understand is how you can "extract" your equity with say 88 in the SB as an example (I use this hand because a player posted asking whether he should have raised 2 limpers from the BB with the hand as was told that he should). If you raise after 2 passive limpers and the BB and limpers call how can you possible make anything out of your pocket pair if you miss your set and a couple of overs fall. If you bet out and get called how can you play the turn with any confidence? Are they drawing? Has one of them caught a bigger pair (very likely). Are we not losing any pre-flop equity we may have had by firing into the pot with an underpair? Unless they all miss you are not going to find 3 folds from loose players and even then they may peel the flop with overcards giving you more bullets to dodge if you are not already far behind. If loose passive players will nearly always peel the flop and we don't want to keep firing if we only have 2 outs I find it hard to see how the hand is playable with a possitive expectation! Unless the flop is all unders, which in itself makes a flop call MORE likely as more draws may be on offer and the fishies will be fiercely clutching their precious overcards, then we have a minefield to negociate to have any chance of winning a showdown.

Am I making sense here os is their something fundamental I am missing?

This is proably a bigger problem at lower limits where there are more loose calling type players than at a higher level where top pair will very often raise and you can drop. But when they just call we seem to be in a bad spot.

88 is just my example hand but 99 is also a hand I do not like to raise from the blinds with more than 2 in.

I understand that our PP has an equity edge pre-flop but being out of position how can we not hand that edge straight back when we are behind on the flop?

I posted this here as shorthanded is where more of the calling type players live and where our raise get so little respect cause we raise a lot of hands.

Sorry if this comes across as a little garbled but my head is spinning with a million different poker thoughts today. This is number 1!! [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img]