Winning PLO strategy (Feb 6, part II)
I was reading through Ciaffone's PLO book tonight, which includes O8/b stuff in it, and a thought struck me comparing O8/b and PLO.
In O8/b (and other hi-lo split games) the player at the end of the night that scoops the most pots ends up the biggest winner. In other words, your main winning strategy is to play hands to scoop pots. Everything else is just good strategy aimed at not making mistakes and winning pots here and there. Basically just treading water until you can scoop.
If you are up against decent opponents who themselves aren't making a lot of basic exploitable mistakes, then really most of the time you are just trading winning/splitting pots. Luck will prevail over the shorterm, but based on these regular pots no one will really win. That's all pretty standard.
Now in PLO, we always hear how you should only play 4 cards "that work together". Cloutier talks about not playing cards "with danglers". And Ciaffone walks through different hands and his favorite hands are ones where all 4 cards can work together in some way. You don't want something like 88AK, two hands that are decent in holdem, if you have 4 cards working together then you have 6 ways to use your starting cards.
The main goal with these is to flop a made hand that can then draw to an even better one.
Ts Tc 9c 8d
This is a good starting hand example, because you can flop a set and have a straight or flush draw or perhaphs even a full house if the board pairs.
If one were to just play these premium types of hands (eliminating low pairs and straights), I think you'd only have a VPIP of 10-15%??? So clearly you have to play less strong hands, otherwise you'd fall asleep and you might never get action. Is PLO then just a game where you trade 60/40 situations and coinflips (and shorterm luck rules your immediacy), and at the end of the day the winner is the player that hits these made + drawing hands the most?
Should this strategy be the foundation of winning PLO? And everything else (95% of the hand analysis on this board) is just treading water?
In O8/b (and other hi-lo split games) the player at the end of the night that scoops the most pots ends up the biggest winner. In other words, your main winning strategy is to play hands to scoop pots. Everything else is just good strategy aimed at not making mistakes and winning pots here and there. Basically just treading water until you can scoop.
If you are up against decent opponents who themselves aren't making a lot of basic exploitable mistakes, then really most of the time you are just trading winning/splitting pots. Luck will prevail over the shorterm, but based on these regular pots no one will really win. That's all pretty standard.
Now in PLO, we always hear how you should only play 4 cards "that work together". Cloutier talks about not playing cards "with danglers". And Ciaffone walks through different hands and his favorite hands are ones where all 4 cards can work together in some way. You don't want something like 88AK, two hands that are decent in holdem, if you have 4 cards working together then you have 6 ways to use your starting cards.
The main goal with these is to flop a made hand that can then draw to an even better one.
Ts Tc 9c 8d
This is a good starting hand example, because you can flop a set and have a straight or flush draw or perhaphs even a full house if the board pairs.
If one were to just play these premium types of hands (eliminating low pairs and straights), I think you'd only have a VPIP of 10-15%??? So clearly you have to play less strong hands, otherwise you'd fall asleep and you might never get action. Is PLO then just a game where you trade 60/40 situations and coinflips (and shorterm luck rules your immediacy), and at the end of the day the winner is the player that hits these made + drawing hands the most?
Should this strategy be the foundation of winning PLO? And everything else (95% of the hand analysis on this board) is just treading water?
posted by Andrew at 8:36 PM
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