Profitably set-mining

Thehitpack

I have been doing a lot of studying the past year.

I've been looking at the calling 3-betting ranges in Core. They list pocket pairs from 55+ as a call in certain positions.

If i'm playing 2c/5c and both players ahave full stack of £5.

I have pocket 66 in the CO. I raise to $0.15c and the button 3bets to $0.45.

Is this is any easy call. The charts say so, I read that you flop a set 1 in 9 times mathmatically.

Going by microgrinder poker school i would need $6.75 to make it a profitable call.

Just looking for some insight guys on your opinions please

Red

You should study more :)

Focussing on getting a set 1 in 9 times (or to be exact, 10.8% of the time), doesn't show the whole reality of it.
Here are some thing you haven't consider:

• For your odds to be right, you need villain to pay you off. There are many situation when Villain is not going to pay enough for you to be +EV (for example too risk averse or a bad runout).
• Sometimes Villain will have a high set and you lose (your whole stack).
• Most of time you will play out of position (like you open CO and BU 3bets). You lose some equity by being OOP - for example if Villain doesn't c-bet, you lose one street of value.
• Most of time you don't hit your set. What do you do in these case, check/fold ? If so, you're overfolding flop and let Villain 3bet - cbet very very wide and exploit you.
• Have you realized that against AA, 65s has more equity that 66 ? 66 has the same equity as QTs. Also if you're against KK, A5s has a ton more equity than 66. So why calling with the "worst" hand 66 ? ;-)

tl;dr : You should really not focus on which hand is "mathematically" right to call based on odds. You should focus on what is your OOP strategy against a 3bet (based on different 3bet profile/range) and which hands fit your strategy better.

Thehitpack

Great answer Thanks for the insight

TheGameKat

The other thing to keep in mind is that some of those calls with small pocket pairs in our CORE ranges aren't really set mines.

Frankly, I found some of them odd too, and had a chat with our brain trust. Some issues to keep in mind when interpreting these results from The Machines.

Our defending frequencies are important.
All results are dependent on the ranges assumed for our opponents.
Domination is important to any calculation that is driven, at least in part, by equity considerations.

The last part is really fascinating and I haven't fully wrapped my head around it yet, but here's a sort of toy example.

Let's suppose you're facing a 3-bet range that includes AK and KQ, but not weaker kings. Calling with KJ looks like a pretty bad prospect. Calling with 55, against those particular combos, looks good based on equity.

Now obviously we're also up against overpairs in the 3-bet range, against which the baby pairs are usually regarded as "set mines". But if they are in the calling range because they have good equity against that range as a whole, we have to be a bit careful not to play them like pure set mines. In other words, to make the call with these hands profitable, we're also going to have to play well postflop, and playing well in this case is a lot more than playing the fit-or-fold game, hoping to spike that set.

Russ

TheGameKat wrote: »

Now obviously we're also up against overpairs in the 3-bet range, against which the baby pairs are usually regarded as "set mines". But if they are in the calling range because they have good equity against that range as a whole, we have to be a bit careful not to play them like pure set mines.

This was a huge hole in my game forever. When I finally realized that, I took those PP's out of my ranges for a while. Then when I got a better understanding of postflop and turn play, I put them back in. Not only did I plug a leak, but I found some extra profit.

Hotsteppa

some really good answers here. It can be profitable to play this as a pure set mine, you have the odds. though it is so player dependent. you need aggressive players who c bet alot and dont mind stacking off with top pair or decent draw type hands. Using this strategy against these aggro type of players you do need to be a bit fit or fold. you can loose so much against them trying to defend the right frequency as they barrel. Dont worry about balance as long as you pick pristine spots.