I'm wondering if low pocket pairs below say 5 are even worth playing. I know they have potential to flop sets and take big pots etc... but I've been experiencing a lot of bad beats with them when I would flop 2nd best set. In the past week pocket fours have lost me over $200 when I flopped sets with them because some other guy would flop a higher set than me. In one particular situation I flopped bottom set and was up against someone with a set of aces and someone else with a set of Kings. $300 pot would have been nice to win but I got burned bad with it. Any advice on how low pocket pairs should be played is appreciated.

I'll play pocket pairs about 90% of the time, unless I'm up against a HUGE PF raise (and occasionally even then)... I think that's about as bad of luck as you can get w/ your trips over trips... I'm not much for odds (ask Aisthesis for the numbers), but I can't imagine the odds of it happening are high enough to worry about it much...

There is danger in low PP, set over set sucks and can be frusterating but almost all of the good players I know are making a large % of the money with small and middle pairs. My pt database my bigges winners are of course AA, followed by 55, and 22. After a little less than 10k hands I'm up money with every PP except K's.