You are set mining too much in endgame spots

The cost of getting set mining wrong is massive when ICM pressure is significant, says Dara O'Kearney.

A student was railing a final table replay recently and showed me this hand. Six players remain, C.Darwin2 opens with AA and Adrian Mateos snap folds 88 in the SB. They were 46bbs effective, but crucially there was a player with half a bb at the table. 

My student understood the need to play very tight in this spot but did not understand why Mateos could not set mine. It costs him just 2bbs and he can make a tight fold on the flop if he doesn't improve. 

I saw the spot and thought 88 was a trivial fold, I ran the spot afterwards and JJ is a fold and QQ is a set mine. 

Why we don't set mine can be answered, curiously, by looking at cash game ranges. 

This is a 200bb BTN response to an UTG open. Ignore most of it, just notice that not every pocket pair calls all the time. This goes against the common wisdom that small pairs make great hands in deep cash games. 

An equity disaster

The reason we don't set mine in that tough final table spot is the same reason we don't always set mine while deep-stacked in a cash game - it's an equity disaster when we get set over set.

It is true most of the time we have an easy flop decision in both spots. It's also true we could potentially win a massive pot post flop if we make a set. 

However, around 15% of the time we make a set, our opponent makes a better set. 

In both cases the cost of it going wrong dwarves the upside of getting it right. In the cash game it likely costs us 200bbs, at a final table it could cost us 10, 20 or 50 buy-ins. 

It seems nitty, but set over set, or flush over flush, happens in poker. It's one of the reasons why GTO ranges have shown us that small speculative hands are not as valuable as we thought. 

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