This hand got out of control: Was I right to stay in?

[Romulus141]

Don't tell us you won this hand in your initial post. It can skew advice.

I have nothing more to add to the general advice of cap pre-flop and fold the turn. Lots of times here you will be up against something nasty that has you reverse dominated. That river raise is bad because of this. Notice how an OESD has just possibly been completed there. Someone with pocket aces still beats you. Any other set still beats you, etc. The best you can beat is 2-pair, and that's questionable. The ace is not a good card for you on this board.

As for the advice flying around that we should cap the turn because the players here are idiots (and we have no reads supplied to justify this), that's being results oriented. The OP got lucky, normally this won't happen. You normally won't win even 10% of the time here. But, let's do some EV calculations for the turn, and assume after the Hero's action, we're all-in.

20.25:3 for calling. Given action, we're better only about 10% of the time here, even with the assumption one of the players in the pot is a complete maniac.
20.25 * 0.10 + (-3)*0.90 = 2.025 - 2.7 = -0.675

So what if we cap instead? Assume all players behind us will call cap. With cap, pot would normally be 30.25, but as we see, the rake has played a role here, so I'll use the river value of 28.25. Once again, we assume to be all-in after hero's decision.
28.25*0.10 + (-4)*0.90 = -0.775

So, capping is an even worse decision. Now, if you estimate yourself to be good 20% of the time, our decisions become +EV, but given the previous action, I don't think you can be that generous. Most of the time, when you're caught in this situation, you're way behind, probably having two outs at best. Replay this hand with different villians, but same action. You can't be sure that they're bluffing here, and it'll be quite expensive if you constantly look them up.

About a year ago, shortly after I had read SSHE for the first time, I remember having a similiar mind-set of "fish can't have the hands they're repping, so blast them out of the pot!" I was raising hands I shouldn't have raised, and went too far post-flop. For a week or so I met with success, but then the cards evened out and I lost what I had won with my poor play (and then some more following that), simply because in situations like these, I thought my opponents were so stupid that there's no way my top pair could ever be bad, and that justified me playing like a LAG/maniac. And all the while, I thought I was applying the SSHE concepts properly. After some review and messageboard reading, I quickly saw I was very wrong, and that I needed to clean up my act.

I'll get off my soapbox now for the time being. The moral of the story is, fish can have good hands, and being results oriented = bad.