i've been playing a little razz lately for fun and noticed something on 4th street

you're rarely getting worse than 3 to 1 on a call.

so i did some sims:

ProPokerTools Razz Simulation

141,181,040 trials (Exhaustive)

Hand	Pot equity	Wins	Ties
458q	32.42%	45,620,301	288,909
4678	67.58%	95,271,830	288,909

it seems that when you brick you're usually getting the right price to call unless its been made 2 bets to you. i dont know how this changes in multiway pots but if i am getting the right price to call then surely i should be making the call often?

but i have read many people say when you brick on 4th just let it go. if the pot odds are correct, why are they saying that?

here's a more drastic sim

ProPokerTools Razz Simulation

141,181,040 trials (Exhaustive)

Hand	Pot equity	Wins	Ties
3673	19.89%	28,084,468	0
a245	80.11%	113,096,572	0

Problem is that while you have odds to call if you were all in, there are still 3 more streets of betting left. So you might very well have to call mutiple streets as an underdog.

ProPokerTools Razz Simulation

671,580 trials (Exhaustive)

Hand	Pot equity	Wins	Ties
458qA	33.88%	227,040	1,026
4678A	66.12%	443,514	1,026

You can not compare immediate pot odds to showdown equity. OK so say you're getting 3:1 to call 4th. But you expect to have to call a bet on 5th, 6th and 7th. So there are 3 small bets in the pot and you have to call 7 more so your effective odds to see the river could be up to (7+3):7 or 10:7 which is 1.42:1 (requiring you to need about 41% equity to make calling down breakeven)

You have to take into account the odds of your opponents hand improving. Although I only have the odds for London Lowball (losing TH) the principles largely apply. One card will not kill you but you want to aiming for a better target hand than 8 low. It will rarely stand up.

I have even seen someone have to play Full House Qs over Kings (QQQKKKK) at London Lowball at the MSO. But 6 lows are common place.

The problem with Razz is that there are too many betting rounds before you have your made hand. Razz, you never want to bluff early on.

Eminently true. Of course, a lot of the time you're going to fold before getting to 7th so the equity you need is somewhere in between. And don't forget implied odds, which means if your 3 card hand is smooth then when you get lucky and make a strong hand you're much more likely to get paid off but if you don't you'll cut your losses by folding before showdown.

If you really want to know what kind of pot odds you need to continue in HU pots like this, you need to take into account how much you're likely to win/lose for all the possible ways 5th st can come, and then all the ways 6th and 7th can come if you continue. Warning: this is a lot of work.

Yeah what I gave is pretty much the worst case. Until you get to 6th I don't think you have a prayer of enumerating outcomes well enough to make a really good estimation of effective odds.

Something that is occaisonally interesting if you have a lot of time is to try to think of "classes" of 6th streets, and what percentage of them will be profitable for you if you get there. I wrote some simulation tools that do this kind of thing - they make sort of a 2d graph of current equity vs future equity, generating sort of a "cloud" of future equities. It takes *forever* to run and I'm not sure the results are really that useful but I found it interesting. There's some info here:
http://rustybrooks.com/poker/new_analysis/