When do you guys set mine? What makes it profitable?

use octopi poker, they have some pretty good multi-way ranges you can play and it will tell you which hands to play. or you can gto wizzard which is super expensive

I set mine almost always in 1/3 games. There are exceptions. If it is going HU, it usually isn't profitable to play a small pp. Also, sometimes in a 3! pot you aren't getting odds. I sometimes 3! 99-TT when I think I have the best hand. Don't like 3!ing 88. Usually open raise with small pps and only open limp in special situations. Sometimes raise limpers with small pps and sometimes limp behind.

Usually, when I miss with a small pp, I am done with it. With 88-TT, often you are ahead unimproved. Generally, they are not good hands to bluff with, as they don't make many draws. There are some situations when you can call a small flop bet multiway in position, partly to draw to 2 outs and partly to bluff if everyone seems weak. Sometimes you can make straight draws and have a fairly strong hand without a set.

In some mid stakes games, were there is a lot of 3-betting and not many multiway pots, small pps should often be folded in ep. In those situations, they should only be played when you know a multiway pot is likely. For example you can overcall with them.

I don't think solvers are terribly useful for this, because it is about the dynamics of multiple loose/passive players. You can look at multiway, but even then it assumes correct play. Part of the value is bad players playing wide ranges and stacking off with 2-pair.

I'll set mine if:

1: I'm closing the action or in late position, and the players behind me are super passive (virtually never 3!).
2: There is at least one player that is 100+ bbs deep with me that I believe is prone to stacking off light postflop.
3: Post-flop action is likely to be passive. If people are frequently checking top pair and good draws in multi-way pots. Nothing better than getting a free turn when set mining.

Otherwise, I'm prone to 3! almost all pps in late position and just fold as I believe players behind me are more likely to get involved.

In general, my goal is to get HU in a 3! pot in position with all hands. Including pps. If I'm IP and I don't think a squeeze will get the job done, and don't fear a squeeze behind then I'll flat and see what develops. When you get HU or three-way, then you have a lot more options to try to win the pot other than hitting a set. If you're getting 5-6 ways, then you get that ugly situation of hitting a set that isn't good too often. Low pocket pairs make wonderful barreling hands because they unblock everything relevant that might call, call, fold on most boards, are easy no-brainer folds when you run into resistance, and can sometimes convert into a strong value hand mid-bluff.

RFI most of the time trying to get heads up where I can pressure bluff. This allows me to often win without a set. Over limping makes no sense to me, except short-stacked in a tournament.

I call most opens and see what happens. Might 3bet in position for reasons same as above. I like to have more than just ‘set mining’ as an option.

A game with lots of 3betting and 4betting, I likely fold 77 on down. Also late in a tournament, I’m letting those hands go

You can’t really find a generic answer to your questions because it’s so player dependent. Who is in the pot or will be in the pot if we get involved? Is it profitable comes down to will we get paid?

It’s kinda like playing a flush draw. If you’re not going to get paid when it hits, it’s probably -EV to invest very much. The people tell the story with small pairs more than the math.

It is very situational. Oop hu against someone who plays very well i doubt you're giving up much by folding 77 to a 3! Especially in the high rake games most of us play. Not that I find that fold very often. Also you save some variance with a fold.

If someone is going to pay off big every time they have second best it's a crime to fold 22 to them for any reasonable amount if at all deep.

The Grey area is other skill issues. If you occasionally find creative bluffs and hero calls you can play more vs Vs who are vulnerable to those things.

It is a marginal hand to play HU. Generally, I would not call a 3! with it HU, unless you are fairly deep against a bad player who usually has QQ+. Playing 4 or more ways is generally printing. If you are in a game with mostly multiway pots, it is good to play even in ep.

This is basically it. I'll admit I have trouble following these kinds of rules exactly as it can lead to a lot of folding (ex. I often open pre as light as 22 from UTG at my 1/3). But I have a couple things going for me:

1. no one 3-bets me at nearly high enough frequency
2. people often let me see turns and sometimes rivers for free, so my realized equity is actually 4/5ths my raw equity I imagine, on average (I get to the turn for free so so much even OOP).
3. people dont respect my image AT ALL. I can just plink a set of twos OTT on like A-T-9ccd-2os and check-raise massive and the people at my game always give me some draw or bluff.

Cliff: dont get sucked in and justify calling more postflop, sometimes I'll have a fish gluuuuued to his overpair cbetting flop OOP for large sizing on J-7-3 and I'll talk myself into "if I hit my 2 OTT I get his whole stack so maybe I can call this bet?!"...not worth it.

If you're playing the hand purely for set mine value, I ask myself whether I will get at least 10-1 on average when I hit. You've also got to consider the chances that you will be able to see a flop though. Sometimes there will be significant action and you will have to fold preflop. Other posters have gotten into a lot more of the nitty gritty situational stuff.

In most 1/2 and 1/3 games, you can open 22 UTG. You can also limp it and if the action is bad, you can fold for 1xBB. IMO it would be a big mistake to fold a pp UTG at almost any 1/3 table.

- You make more money if you can raise and take it down than playing almost any hand, so do that if that's an option. Note that 22->66 are pretty bad though so I fold unless in late position.

- Being OOP sucks.

- Overcalling and overlimping with players left to act is dangerous.

- Being deep is good for set mining but when you get too deep, it's not as good because getting oversetted is expensive. 100bbs you can just shrug / GII with 33 on A93 rainbow flop, not as easy say 250bb+ in a single raised pot.

- Bigger pairs are just better, like you can call with say 88 where 22 is a fold.

- The worse the table, the more set-mining is profitable.

Set mining is profitable when:

-You’re deep (150bb+),

-Implied odds are high (loose players who stack off top pair),

-You’re closing the action or facing small raises,

-And SPR ≥ 10 postflop.

Below that, it’s mostly a leak. 22–66 are set-mining hands only; 77–99 can mix between flats and squeezes vs wide opens.

Limping 22 UTG is better than folding in pretty much any game 2/5 or under. If you get a multiway single-raised or limped pot, that is an excellent result. If it is a 4! pot or a 3! or single-raised pot HU, you can sometimes fold for 1xBB. It is often better to limp at 2/5 than 1/2 to limp, because there is more 3-betting at 2/5. At 1/2, you can open to 8 or 10 UTG and often get 4 flat callers. In a tougher game, sure, it is a fold in ep. Regs misplay this, because they think it is important to play aggressive and not to limp.

Poker's been so widely available for so long that the number of players and scenarios where you're fist pumping over getting the 3rd nuts all in for 1000bbs are overwhelmingly dominated by the number of times you'll have to actually use your brain and play poker.

Obviously caveats abound: a lot of people play in juicy NYC home games that is still functionally like Bush-era poker, there are individual whales who (once you get deep enough against them) you loathe to fold any set+ maker, etc.

And even more obviously, the ability to make a set is a major contributor to any pocket pair's EV against any player in any sufficiently deep-stack scenario. It's just that the times that you're purely "set mining" (just saying "I have pocket pair and the call:effective stacks are x, therefore I call) should be pretty exceptional.

Pocket pairs are high-key the most fascinating preflop hand type across all stacks and configurations for a lot of reasons, not all of which are relevant here.

Basically have two favorable qualities that are in tension with each other: 1) they have very stable hot-and-cold equity versus any but the tightest ranges, but have a very hard time getting to showdown with them at a high frequency; 2) They have highly profitable tail-end scenarios (ie: flopping a set) that make up the difference of all the times they fold their equity in other scenarios.

So the wider someone's preflop range is and the more passive they are postflop, the more likely you are to realize your hot-and-cold equity. The tighter someone's preflop range is and/or the lighter they stackoff postflop, the more the tail-end scenarios can carry the EV burden on its own. These aren't strictly mutually exclusive, but it tends to make it so that your equity realization is kind of just broadly and evenly "very good" across scenarios, even though the source of your realization is all over the map.

Equilibrium often converges at the point where the aggressor's sizes and ranges make low pocket pairs indifferent between folding and calling at a small frequency. So if there are other fish donating EV to the system with nonsense cold calls and double-call type lines, then this tends to make these hands pure continues. A trillion caveats here about configs where this isn't true, it's very contingent on sizes and ranges whether you yourself are entering the pot cold, etc, but I'm just illustrating how the set mine crowd and the charts crowd are going to end up giving similar answers in a lot of scenarios.

But the justification matters: it will effect how much you give up on the pot just because you didn't hit a set, how much you consider card rank, how much you consider implied odds on everyone's stack as opposed to direct odds, etc.

You are trying to make it more difficult than it is. In low stakes through 2/5, you have people who want to see a flop with whatever. So see a flop with a small pp, occasionally flop close to the nuts and get paid off by random 2-pair or whatever.

In terms of GTO, you usually don't want to play small pps. You want to play totally different in a tough mid stakes game. Late in a tournament, with mostly blind stealing and short stacks, it doesn't make sense to set mine much. There are situations at low stakes where you should fold them.

You can use your skills to play poker with other hands and can 3-bet light and bluff postflop with other hands.

This was a great response, but I want to highlight this part.

Esp. in weak games (Eg. most 1-2 casino games) this (the other horrifically bad players) will make bad PP calls into fine/good calls vs. good players ... and there's not much the good player can do about it (way overfold when they hit top pair, and hope they don't get exploited for it).

So you get these weird spots where if you just spew call any pair, it can be fine because of the other players and if you correctly fold some PP, it can be "incorrect" because of the other players. And while it's great to be the genius who only calls when it's good, what I see happen a lot more often is that people get used to it being fine and spew call all the time and don't see that they are losing when it's not a good spot.

tbh think pairs are the most under realized ev subset of hands in basically all preflop configs for most people but i can't prove it

Profit comes from stacking top pairs. So: deep stacks + loose villains + low 3-bet frequency = green light.

Shallow, tough tables? Just fold or 3-bet mid pairs instead.

I think the plurality of my disagreements with LLSNL come down to this:

You have to break looseness and passivity down between preflop and postflop. The standard player archetype at LLSNL is loose-passive preflop. But the number of players who are loose postflop relative to their preflop range are exceptional (at least at my standard casino games in an area that's had poker for a long time, etc).

People should be calling down with 3rd pair and shit facing normal-sized bets in single-raised heads up pots, so unless and until they do that, they're probably LP pre / weaktight post.

Which, referring back to my post, is the archetype where you're getting the least amount of your EV from sets and most from hot-and-cold equity, relative to other player types. (Though again, EV from sets are obviously still critical for any sufficiently deep spot.)

Now is it important to argue over whether you should play 66 pre more than the charts say because you're realizing more of your hot-and-cold equity relative to equilibrium than because your sets are getting paid more? I don't know, depends on context. It's at least helpful for answering the last 3 questions in OP.

If people are playing 3! or fold and it is mostly HU pots, small pps should usually be folded. If a 4 or more way pot is likely, they are very valuable. GTO gives a totally misleading idea of when to play them at low stakes.

One trap I have noticed is that is often better to overlimp small pps in 1/2 and 1/3 than raise. If you raise large, you may narrow the field to much. If you raise small, you may provoke a 3!, which is sort of a disaster, play the hand often HU.

At 2/5, it is in a way better to limp small pps in ep. However, regs may read that small pps are a big part of your range, and put you on a set when you play strongly postflop.

Are your last two posts replies to me? If so, I can respond in kind.

Unless the game is very deep and the table is filled with droolers, it's difficult to see how playing Bingo with small PPs will be profitable, especially OOP. You would need to make more money with your sets than your opponents make with their sets, as well as being able to make hero folds with big hands to other players' sets despite stacks often being <150BBs deep.

You can't fold a set with <150BBs, except on a board with a likely flush or straight or certain high paired boards. You beat 2 pair. Set over set is important real deep.

It is hugely profitable to play Bingo against loose passives, where you make close to the nuts. That is usually more profitable than bluffing them. Against a calling station, you want to show them a hand. It is much easier playing a set going to the flop 5 ways than to play an overpair with JJ+ or TPTK with AK. A set beats all the random 2-pairs they make playing marginal high cards and suited cards.

There are definitely situations to fold a small pp preflop in a 1/3 game and more in a typical 2/5 game. From what I can see, they are often unplayable in casino public games 5/10 and above, but I haven't played those games. They are often unplayable in tournament situations.

for the logic in this thread to be consistent, you guys must be absolutely printing at nonshowdown (you are not)