The Death of Set Mining?

A couple of years ago there were lots of full-ring nits who made a living just set-mining (calling raises with any pocket pair and shoveling in money when they hit three of a kind). As long as opponents didn't adjust, this strategy was quite profitable. You can see why - you flop a set about 12% of the time and when you get in the money you have about 90% equity. If your opponent's pre-flop raising range is mostly big pocket pairs that will often flop overpairs to your set, you will be getting the money in post-flop when you DO flop a set quite frequently.

How has the game changed to make this strategy obsolete? Two ways. One way is that players are more aware of the set-mining strategy, able to spot the set-mining nits, and fold a decent hand post-flop when these players start to show aggression. While this does make set-mining, less profitable, it's by far the less important of the two adjustments, which is that players have widened their pre-flop raising ranges, so that the set-miners will often make a set against 7-high, rather than an overpair, and make only a c-bet postflop rather than an entire stack. Hardly worth paying 3 bbs for a 1 in 9 shot at making 4 bbs. The other part of pre-flop raising ranges being wider is that sets actually have LESS equity when they do get the money in, because they will often be up against big draws or better made hands, which have far more than the ~10% equity an overpair will generally have.

There are exceptions, of course, where pure set-mining can be profitable, mostly when you are more than 100 bbs deep, it's a multi-way pot, and/or you know that the pre-flop raiser has a very narrow range and will be willing to stack off with an overpair (as I've described, these players are rarer and rarer).

I still see a fair amount of regulars set-mining in spots that I'd estimate are unprofitable. If you don't believe me that set-mining is dead, 1) go through your database and look at all the times you've called an pre-flop raiser HU with 22-66 and look at your bb/100 if it's a large enough sample, 2) look at the PTR pages of the guys that used to do nothing but set-mine. They've either moved to lower stakes, changed their games, or have lost all their money.

-BRUECHIPS