More thoughts on PLO

I played exclusively PLO again this week, but only managed a disappointing total of 8.5 hours.

As previously discussed, I haven’t looked to see how I did for the week: short-term results are not important and being a slave to them can lead to the setting of conflicting goals. I can tell you that I played really well all week except for a brief spell during last night’s session were I got a little bit over-eager.

My cumulative win rate stands at $51.73, so I must have won at a higher rate than my final 2007 rate of $49.35.

My wife has set me a goal of winning $6,000 before we travel to Disneyworld in Orlando on February 15th. Things are progressing well on this, although I have again tried to shield myself from the results to avoid anxiety. All I know is that at my current rate I need to play another 75.7 hours to achieve target. (I will pretend for now that I can’t calculate that 75 x 50 = 3,750!!)

I have read Rolf Slotboom’s PLO book in the last week or two and I have to say that I found it very helpful.

Omaha is a funny game: as such there are really no bad beats, as the game is all about drawing to the best hand. Sometimes you have the best hand and the best draw, other times you have the worst hand but are a big favourite to have the best hand by the river. In Hold’ Em, the preferred way to play is ‘from the front’, i.e. having the best hand, you set the price for your opponent to chase.

I think the nature of PLO compared to NLHE makes it a much less tilt-inducing game. In Omaha, often a player will be a 3:2 shot on the flop and then a 2:1 shot on the turn. Obviously as the bettor, the worst odds you can offer your opponent is 2:1 so he is quite often correct in chasing once there is some ‘dead money’ in the pot. As the favourite in the pot, you need to accept that your edge comes as much as anything from getting yourself into more situations where you are 60:40 than 40:60, despite the fact that you will still lose plenty of them. I guess this mostly comes down to pre-flop hand selection.

In Omaha the hand values run closer together, especially pre-flop. However, the best hands are those that have nut potential, as they allow you to make a value bet that a non-nut hand can’t necessarily make. Hand-reading is also very important, as it allows you to determine what equity you have currently and how that is likely to change as the hand progresses. From that knowledge you can then determine the best way to play the hand. However, I am aware that I’m not really playing the players that much: I’m simply playing my own hand for the most part. In most hands I am only able to put my opponents on a very wide range of possible hands.

Because it’s Pot Limit, you have to be a bit cagier about how you bet. You can’t always price out drawing hands and the next card can often look horrendous to you unless you improve your hand, especially when out of position.

So far, I feel as though I am doing quite well. I need to tread carefully but I guess that if I am going to step up successfully to the $400 game eventually I will need to add a few things to my game: not least reading my opponents much more accurately than I am currently.