Why Raise with Suited Connectors? (NLHE)

[mvdgaag]

kbinder... your calculation is correct, but you forgot people don't call with random hands AND they don't even limp with random hands. Preflop, only the blinds have money in the pot and a true random hand.
Also your calculation is who wins if everyone goes to the river (including yourself). There can be many scary boards where you just don't know if your aces (or any other big pair) are good when multiway. You will make more mistakes according to the fundamental theorem of poker (Sklansky, NLHE theory and practice), so you will gain less than you assume.
In other words: You forget you don't win that amount of money of your opponents that fold before the river, but it is harder for you to dertermine when you can make up for this by folding yourself (in a multiway pot).

You are completely forgetting any post flop play. EV postflop is so great with suited connectors in multiway pots, because it only costs you the prelfop amount if you don't catch a draw (4 out of 5 times) but you have around 40% equity in the pot on average of you do get your draw. This equity (unlike big pairs) does not depend a lot on the amount of players in the pot, since you are drawing to a bigger hand than they are most of the time. So your profits rise almost linearly with the amount of players in the pot.

so EV = -(4/5)Preflop + (1/5)(0.4)River

Where:
Preflop = the betsize/blindsize preflop
River = the size of the pot on the river (incl. preflop)

For the River amount a pot was built by a certain amount of players. They all put in their share, but as long as you have am equity bigger than your share of the money you gain by putting in more money;

Number of players - Percentage in pot - Equity
2 50% 40%
3 33% 40%
4 25% 40%
5 20% 40%
6 17% 40%

So you are profitable post flop from 2 or more opponents, since you're equity is larger than the percentage of the money put in the pot by you. The more players, the better. I kept the equity on 40% because that is just a guess... It will probably drop a bit with more players, but I guess it would range between 50% and 35% with a 40% average.

I hope this made sense, GL