Trying to hit your set and other thoughts

You want to make an average of 10-11x your preflop investment (1 BB) for the call to be correct (7.5:1 against hitting set, plus some protection for the times you hit and lose). In this case, you had 3 opponents preflop, so you needed to make an average of 7 or 8 BB more postflop. This will almost never happen against three opponents, unless one is a maniac.

That seems to be about correct.

Let's do some math. You hold a wired pair and have two outs to hit your set. With 50 unseen cards our probability of hitting it on the flop is 1-(48/50 * 47/49 * 46/48) = 11.76%. Converting it to odds 100/11.76 - 1 = 7.5. So yeah 7.5 to 1 odds to hit your set. Thus you need to be sure to make at least 7.5 bets to break even. Otherwise you are leaking money.

So how does this affect cold calling? Let's see. UTG raises, 3 cold callers, to you on the button with 22. There are 4 BB in the pot and you have to call 1 BB. You're going to have to hope that you will make 4-7 BB by the river if you hit your set, for the correct implied odds. With a multiway pot, the flop will probably hit several people, and you can expect some bets from UTG, so this is probably profitable. If there is only one cold caller between you and the preflop raiser, there is only 2 BB in the pot and you have to make up 6-9 BB, which is unlikely if it's going to be three way action with a roughly 1/3 chance to hit the flop.

I had a great run last night, where I went up around $400 playing 3/6 on Pacific Poker, and have made a profit of $550 total on Pacific so far. Obviously this isn't a sustainable win-rate, but it's nice to have won around 67 big bets to pad myself for the next downswing. Plus I am slowly working my way to playing 250 raked hands that I put money into and saw a flop. Once I hit 250 they will ship me the WPT Season 1 DVDs.... making money and getting free DVDs. This is the life!