I seem too be loosing a lot of money to small PP (77 and below), too calling preflop and folding postflop.

advice please?

Pretty common rule is 15x to set mine.

What this means is you want the pre flop raiser to have 15x more chips in his stack than you need to call.

Eg.
1/2 game.
You limp 33 for $2. Small Blind nit raises to $14 with a $100 stack. So now, you need to call 12 more dollars in order to have the chance to win 100. This is only like 8x, so you can fold here.

Eg #2.
1/2 game.
You raise 77 from MP1 to $10. Small blind nit raises to 35. You both have stacks of 600. In this case, you need to call 25 in order to win 600, which is like 24x. This is probably a good spot to call.


There are some exceptions. If you are in position and you can win pots without hitting a set, then you can probably call with less than 15x. If you are out of position and the raiser is loose (ie. he doesn't always have monsters that will pay you off AND he will win some pots where your hand is ahead), then you might want better implied odds.

Hope that all makes sense to you and can be helpful,
DUCY

Addition...

Someone might say/think: "Hey, I hit a set like one in every 8.5 flops, so I probably only need implied odds of 7.5:1 to call." However, there's a couple reasons we want to buffer these odds. 1) You don't get paid off every time you have a set. Sometimes the nit has AK instead of AA and when you hit your set of 3s on a 932 board, you don't make another cent. 2) Sometimes you lose the pot, whether set over set or straights/flushes, etc. So, to make up for both of those times, the 15x rule is probably a pretty good guideline.
DUCY

I'd even go as far that setmining is only ever going to work against really terrible players. It just so happened everyone used to be terrible and these "rules" kind of stuck. Thing is the odds of flopping a set are quite terrible, like DUCYdonk said he's not always going to have a hand to stack off with (AK on Q93, QQ on A45 etc), even his naked overpairs are going to overset you like 11% of the time after the flop so not even counting the flop set over set, if he has like a flushdraw the EV isn't even that great.

On the other hand, you don't need to be setmining with smaller pairs if your opponent is willing to let go of some hands or you can pick off a decent amount of his bluffs, or if you actually get it to showdown against ace high. The problem then is that even against a single flopbet you're in a very tough spot unimproved and his AK still has roughly 25% equity unimproved. In my opinion against a lot of players the EV of folding or 4betting > calling.

Depends so much on reads/tendencies/positions/stake level and stacksizes, obv.

OOP, you probably shouldn't get into the habit of calling with pairs lower than 88 in 3-bet pots, even if multiway, as it's generally very hard to win a whole stack when you're OOP, so the implied odds don't exist. Getting over-setted also happens occasionally, and that's always brutal.