Exponential effective SNR mapping (EESM) based link error prediction is widely used for adaptive MIMO-OFDM in system evaluations to simplify simulation complexity. In MIMO system, EESM prediction method is more sophisticated due to specific MIMO detection techniques and spatial selectivity of multiple antennas. Especially for maximum likelihood (ML) detection it is hard to determine post-detected SNR due to non-linearity of ML detection, so penalty method based on MMSE detection has been proposed for EESM mapping. Simulations show EESM based effective SNR for ML receiver has obtained high fitting precision compared with AWGN performance in QPSK or 16QAM modulation, convolution coding with rate 1/2 in 2 times 2 MIMO-OFDM system. This method can be naturally generalized into other modulation and coding rates, higher level of MIMO modes, and other fading channels with frequency selectivity, time selectivity or spatial selectivity.