Focus on $200 PLO

I’ve spent a bit of time playing PLO8 at ($200 and $400 buy-ins) and PLO (at both levels too) in the last couple of weeks. If I am honest with myself I have not performed well at PLO8 (both levels) or PLO $400. In PLO8 it’s generally down to a lack of experience in the game: I simply haven’t worked out a winning strategy yet. In PLO $400 I have been too aggressive in the pots I have played and have got my money in from way behind too many times.

On Monday I decided that I must stick to PLO $200 for the foreseeable future. This is for the simple reasons that I have until now performed well in these games and my bankroll of $12k is simply not enough to play the $400 buy-in game, where I am not even sure that I am a long-term winner.

I had a steady but unspectacular week, managing to play over 17 hours. Although I made plenty of mistakes, there were still plenty of players playing a lot worse than I do.

One thing I discovered this week when analysing past hands is the huge impact having a ‘live’ flush draw has on the value of a drawing hand.

Example

I had QT93 (suited in diamonds) against KK44 (no diamonds) on a flop of KJ7 (2 diamonds). According to simulations my hand wins 55% of the time, even against top set!

However, give the opponent a higher flush draw and my hand become a big (30:70) dog.

Even if we just remove the flush draw from the equation, the drawing hand becomes a 46% shot.

This seems to point out that we should be careful when playing these types of hands. However, in this situation it is often easy to pinpoint the opponent’s range of possible holding down to AAxx or KKxx. If this had been AA44 with no diamonds my hand would have been a huge 71% favourite. Really, this highlights that when you have position and your opponent gives away his hand, it really is a good move to call and see the flop against ‘obvious Aces’ with a decent drawing hand, as the above scenarios do not include situations where we flop a monster. Once again, it shows how bad it is to give away your hand, unless of course you can get most of your stack in pre-flop.

This week the plan is to play as much PLO as possible at $200 buy-in. Hopefully the ‘Disney Target’ will be achieved before the deadline of February 14th.