First of all, this site Rox!! and I'd like to try to make a contribution after recieveing lots of great information and advice from this site and its players. I hope this information is accurate and useful and i welcome any criticism.

I've been looking at the numbers on the small pocket pairs and excluding the situation you may be in (i.e. super tight player goes all in with an ace on the flop) you are generally safe to place a large bet on trips small pocket pair.

Its great when they hit the flop, but a lot of the time its a flop / fold situation, unless of course you steal the pot, but i'll ignore that for this analysis.

ok, you have roughly a 1 in 8 chance of catching trips with a pair. I then ran this through the hand player 2s Vs Aces and Kings (3 player pot, rags on the flop, which include your trip card 2 7 9 ) 10,000 times 3-4 times. The trip 2s won 82% of the time :)

This said we can rely on these cards being a winner for us 1/8*.82=10.25% of the time. The great thing about low pocket trips is that noone sees them coming. Whenever they hit you are usually in for a nice pot. This said, I wanted to know how much I could pay to limp in with them to stay profitable . . . enter the hand value.

=SUM((1/8)*(82/100)*Pot)-SUM(7/8*Call1)-SUM((1/8)*(Large Bet+Call1))

Hand Value 0.84 0.41 -0.47 0.53
Pot Size 22.50 22.50 22.50 42.50
Call 1 0.50 1.00 2.00 2.00
Large Bet 10.00 10.00 10.00 20.00

Hand value shows us what we will make everytime we get and play that hand to the specs shown. This shows that in an avg showdown where you can expect to win 22.50 (Blinds and early calls 2.50 + are callable bet).

As we can see calling with a low pocket pair for $2 + will lose money if you can only win a $22.50 pot. Play that hand 1000 times and you are down $457.00!!!! << Now that is a big leak!!! However If you know you can make a $42.50 pot from them, they are now worth the money :)

Summary if the avg pots are only hitting the $20.00 and you have small pocket pair they are not worth a $1.50 call, doing so is gambling and that's not we are about. :D

If however the pots are big with big bank rolls, you could probably push the call upto $3 a pop and still have a positive hand value.

A second important point to note:

If you play with a limited bankroll playing small pocket pair hoping for trips is not for you, the 7 times you lose $0.50 and the 2 times you lose a large bet could kill off your cash and stop you from playing. If your bankroll can easily take it as long as the hand value is in the + play this hand all day long for 0.5 - $2+ pot dependant.

Personally I will only limp in with a 0.50 call as I have to uterlise some areas to fill leaks in my play in other areas, I'm still new and make stupid mistakes.

Finally if there is a flush draw on the board your trips will drop 12% effectiveness, from 82% to 70%. This can of course be fixed with a heavy flop bet or fake bluff.

Also I remember seeing that you have a 1 in 5 chance after you hit trips to then go on to hit a boat, but I havn't double checked that...

Well thats it let me know what you think.

Toasty
Toasty