How to remove unnecessary white space between title and table using kable in R Markdown to Beamer

Question

I want that the title of my table (blabla) goes close to the top of the table (no extra space). This question may be the same as from Sara, but I provide a reproducible example. I have tried these tips, but they don't work out.

---
title: "XYZ"
output: 
  beamer_presentation
---
```{r, include=FALSE}
library(knitr)
```
## 
```{r}
kable(mtcars[1:2,1:2],
      caption = "blabla",
      format = "latex")
```

\begin{table}

\caption{blabla}
\centering
\begin{tabular}{l|r|r}
\hline
  & mpg & cyl\\
\hline
Mazda RX4 & 21 & 6\\
\hline
Mazda RX4 Wag & 21 & 6\\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\end{table}

Produces:

How can I remove the extra white space (in either case)? It would better a proper solution, i.e., without manually changing the LaTeX code from kable...

Answer 1

Half of the white space is caused by rmarkdown using \begin{tabular}[t]{l|r|r} instead of \begin{tabular}{l|r|r}

The other half is the default spacing beamer uses below captions. You can control it via \setlength\belowcaptionskip{7pt}, but I would suggest to keep changes restricted to the table environment to not effect places where the caption is supposed to be below stuff like figures.

\documentclass{beamer}

\AtBeginEnvironment{table}{\setlength\belowcaptionskip{0pt}}

\begin{document}
    
\begin{frame}
\begin{table}
\caption{content...}
\begin{tabular}{cc}
\hline
c & d\\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\end{table}
\end{frame} 

\begin{frame}
\begin{figure}
\includegraphics[width=.5\textwidth]{example-image-duck}
\caption{content...}
\end{figure}
text
\end{frame} 
    
\end{document}