The Statistics of Set Mining in No-Limit Texas Holdem

Set Mining is a power tool in the arsenal of any serious player.  Hitting your set on the flop, especially when your opponent is the aggressor, will almost guarantee you to walk away from the hand with a nice pot, and possibly your opponent’s whole stack.

A player is dealt a poker pair once out of every 17 hands, however the odds of flopping a set are only 7.5 to 1, so the question becomes: is this profitable over the long run?  Since exact probabilities are not necessary at the poker table, lets round up to 8:1. This means that for every nine tries, we will only flop a set once. In order for this to be a break-even play, we must be able to win enough to equal the 8 times that we lost. This creates two constraints on our equation, 1)we must see the flop for as cheap as possible, and 2) we must only play this situation against players that have a stack size at the very least eight times the average pre-flop bet.  Now most players online tend to raise 3 times the big blind.  So our opponent must have at least 24 times the big blinds in his stack.

Ok, now if you’re are already a poker player you’re probably freaking out because you already know that “Set Mining” is most profitable against “Deep Stacks” of say 140 big blinds or more, but certainly no less than 100 big blinds. In this case you’re absolutely right.  Although my calculation shows 24 big blinds is required, this only represents what is required to break-even, and it does not account for all those times that you flop a set but are unable to extract a big pot, or the few times that you lose to a better hand.  When all of that is taken into account, then the number becomes 100 big blinds or more.

So in conclusion, set mining is a very profitable move, but be sure that you are seeing the flop as cheap as possible, and only against players that you can win at least 100 big blinds from.

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