Goal: World Champion of the PLO $10 and $25 Buyin Tables

I'm completely done with any attempt at meaningful internet poker, other than trying to become the World Champion of the PLO $10 and $25 Buyin Tables, until this whole DOJ-Neteller thing gets settled.

There are way less aggro fish looking to gambol at the lower stakes. Occasionally someone from Amsterdam or some crazy-sounding Scandinavian country will sit down, but they are a rare breed. And, I just can't stomach having any sort of meaningful cash out there to play higher in this climate. God bless any Americans that are playing medium/higher stakes hopefully your games don't dry up and nothing bad happens like the CIA sending a right wing death squad for Lee Jones or Howard Lederer, and then in retaliation PStars and Full Tilt rigging their sites against 'Mericans.

I have been following my February resolution of reviewing one old PLO concept (that I learned before) or learning something new. I haven't been updating this blog with it though. I'll try to get back doing that and maybe list the stuff that I review the last few days.

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?

A Review of How to Beat Loose Passive PLO25 games

Last December I started a thread about the strategy that I was using to beat the PLO25 games (http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=8361246&an=0&page=2#Post8361246).

The games have gotten a bit tougher since then, but there are still plenty of players I can beat, and since I removed most of my bankroll offline, I'm going to wait things out playing PLO25. Invariably my play drifts after a while, and I start playing too many hands and getting very aggressive. I'm not sure this increased aggression is the best strategy, but it certainly adds variance to my results. I'm going to review a couple of strategy points from my original post.

1b. Starting hands of your opponents. As I look at the 6max Stars window right now, I see an average of 60% of people seeing the flops over 7 PLO $25 tables. Clearly people are playing a lot of garbage hands and playing them OOP. This sort of analysis leads me to believe that the best strategy is to play fewer hands. Play better cards and for more raised pots than your opponents. (If you check out the 5 PLO $600 tables it is an average of 43% of players seeing flops.)

5. Flop Play. "Tighten up" is what someone advised on this [2+2 PLO] board. Words to live by in a loose passive (preflop) game. If there are 4 ppl seeing every flop, then it doesn't take a genius to figure out that you need to hit a flop fairly hard.I'm not saying you have to nut peddle, but it's pretty close.

9. Bluffing. You'll want to keep this to a minimum because many of these players will make bad calls (mistakes). You want them to call bad when they have a ten high flush and you an ace high. So how are they going to know when you run a naked ace bluff against them? Pick and choose your best spots to pick up an abandoned pot based on who your opponents are in the hand, their tendencies, your position, your table image, etc. Just don't do it very often.

One finds out pretty quickly that if you bet, they will call with fairly mediocre hands. I.e. it's pointless to bet a flop/turn on some sort of draw and get called each way, then bet pot again on the river even if you missed. Someone will call you with two pair (any two pair), not just top. This of course is how you make so much money when you actually hit your hand - getting paid off by weaker hands.

What are the chances.... (Feb 5th)

So everyone knows if you have something like QQxx and the board is KQx and someone, who very well could have KK shows strength, you should probably throw away your set of Queens (Scenario 1).

However, if you have QQKx in the same situation, it's a lot harder to give credit to someone having KK, because there is only one way to have the two case queens (Scenario 2). I've been playing a lot recently, but I've paid two people off where they have KK. Also, as extra credit, is it more likely to hit the case queen for quads than the chance that someone has KK. I'm going to go with hitting quads as the more likely scenario.

To make the analysis simple let's say that you are playing heads up.

Scenario 1
You have QQxx (where xx are not kings)
Board is KQx

So there are 45 unknown cards and 3 kings unaccounted for (so 42 other cards).
What is the chance that your single opponent was dealt KKxx.
C (3,2) * C(42,2) = 2,709 was for him to have KKxx
C (45,4) = 148,995 possible 4 card combinations with 45 cards left in deck

So I calculated 1.73%, which is close to right answer.
(See here for a link to better calculations: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=9063855&an=0&page=0#Post9063855)

Scenario 2
You have QQKx (where xx are not kings)
Board is KQx

So there are 45 unknown cards and 2 kings unaccounted for (and 43 other cards).
What is the chance that your single opponent was dealt KKxx.
C (2,2) * C(43,2) = 903 ways for him to have KKxx
C (45,4) = 148,995 possible 4 card combinations with 45 cards left in deck.

Answer: 0.61% chance that he has the two case Kings.

Bonus question. If the above Scenario 2 happens to you, then you actually have a 4.9% chance of hitting your one outer for Quads Queens. (http://www.propokertools.com/simulator/simulate.jsp?g=oh&b=KhQd7s&h1=QsQhKd2c&h2=KsKc8h3s&h3=&h4=&h5=)

The cost of giving your hand away in Pot Limit Omaha (Feb 3/4)

Hand value, deception and preflop betting decisions

(I wrote these notes up a while ago with Theory of Poker, written by David Sklansky (DS), open and the idea of how to play aces preflop, so there's a good chance some of these things are plagiarized right out of TOP. I tried to put TOP stuff in quotes, but honestly I'm too lazy to go back and look it up and cite properly.)

But my goal is to apply TOP fundamentals for deciding how to play your best starting hands in PLO without giving away value.

Poker is essentially a game of maximizing gains while minimizing losses.
"When you play in a way that lets your opponents know what you have, you cost yourself.
The more that your play gives away what you have, the less likely opponents will make a mistake." Creating mistakes is the whole objective. When opponents don't know what you're holding, then the are more likely to make mistakes.

When to play straightforwardly and when to use deception
Most important criterion = ability of your opponents.
"The tougher they are, the more you need to throw them off"
"The weaker they are the more you can play optimally"

Cost involved in deception
However, there is an inherent cost involved in deception. If you are not playing optimally, then you are making a mistake*. So in using deception, the idea is to "slowplay" and disguise your hand with the expressed purpose of making more money on later streets.

Bet size. number of players, and deception
DS notes that as the pot size increases the need for deception decreases.
Therefore, in theory the best time to deceive is preflop. Considering that starting hand equity values are much similar in PLO than NLHE, I think preflop deception in PLO calls for further investigation.

Another issue to consider when applying TOP's deception ideas on PLO is that the more players in a hand, the less there is a need for deception. With a game like PLO there is also a need to control the size of the pot. If everyone limps preflop, then there won't be much to play for on the flop. So if you have a very good premium hand you will want to play for a bigger pot on the flop. However, since position is very important in PLO, some players (myself include) combine these two ideas and just raise when they have position and a premium hand.

Playing strong hands OOP
This then brings us to the issue of how to play strong hands when out of position (OOP). Weak players will do foolish things such as only raising with aces and even doing so from the blinds in unraised pots. (A situation like this occurred in a hand that led to this article: http://www.twoplustwo.com/magazine/issue24/Albright1206.html)
However, if you have a strong hand and you do not play in a raised pot, then are you are giving away value of your hand if all cards were turned over. In PLO however as much or more than other games, the value of the cards you are dealt is dependent on position at the table.

Say a player plays 30% of his hands without considering position
20% limps, 10% raises, but will never limp with aces.
Since someone is dealt aces about 2.5% of the time, you know that 1 in 4 times he is raising, he is doing so with aces.
So if he raised and there is an ace, there's really less than a 25% chance that he has trip aces, which means that in part his aces are disguised.
But if this player never limps with aces, then if he limped into the pot and there is an ace on the flop, you can be 100% sure that he doesn't have trip aces/top set. With this approach of never limping with aces, there is no disguise to his limps.

But since aces are the most profitable category of starting hands, can it ever make sense to just limp with aces? Is it possible that a good mixed strategy would include something like raising with aces 75% of the time and limping with aces 25% of the time.

Considerations to this problem would probably include:
How the table/opponents play post flop
Whether or not the pot is raised already when it gets to you
Stack sizes
Average pot size at end of hand
Your position at the table
Playing all premium hands in the same manner




*This is Sklansky's "mistake" meaning that you are costing yourself money by not playing your hand optimally as per the Fundamental Theorem of Poker.

Starting Hand Guidelines (February 2nd)

Starting Hand Guidelines

Nothing new here, but this is something it seems like I need to review constantly before I play, while I play and after I play. My natural tendency is to play too many hands, especially at nice juicy tables. At the lower stakes that I play, I have no information that looser is better. It may not matter of course, but I seem to get into less trouble playing fewer hands.

Also, I'm a firm believer in a game theory/mixed strategy, whereby I could post my starting hand requirements and it wouldn't matter because I have an unexploitable mixed strategy. Plus, I've heard that PLO is a post-flop kind of game anyway.

For 6 handed tables:

UTG and UTG+1 - limp with top 20% hands (raise 20% of time)
LP and Button - limp with 20-30% hands (raise 20% of time), raise with Premium Hands (limp 25%)
SB - call limpers or one PSB with premium hands
BB - call one PSB with premium hands


I consider PLO Premium hands to have the requirement of all 4 cards working together.
Big pairs + suited connectors no lower than 9876.

Playable hands (20-30%)
Big pairs where the other two cards don't work together.
Suited connectors with one gap anywhere or two gaps not at the top, i.e. 9765 is OK as is 9864.
The weaker of these playable hands I wouldn't play in an aggressive preflop/tight postflop game and not upfront.


Other links to PLO starting hand guidelines

Twoplustwo forum discussion
http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=8631426&an=0&page=2#Post8631426

More info
http://www.bet-the-pot.com/pot-limit-omaha-page35.html

Top 50 hands (not super duper useful):
http://pokerforums.fulltiltpoker.com/online-poker-play4484.html

Do you know how many possible starting hand ranks there are:
http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=8837331&an=&page=0&vc=1

Rolf's opinions. Go to 'Ace Speaks: Articles' and then 'What to look for in starting hands'
http://www.rolfslotboom.com/

February 1st

Each day this month, I am going to attempt to learn something new about PLO or review an important concept that I previously learned. This first one (posted 2/2/07) is from yesterday:


Flop with 3 cards of the same suit.

I learned that the chance of someone having a flush when 3 cards of the same suit are dealt on the flop is about 19%, so I decided to try and apply it to an actual game.

I frequently run into a game that is very passive and tight post-flop. People usually represent the strength of their hand post-flop. There is not a lot of deception. If they have the nuts they will bet or re-raise. They have a draw, they might minimum bet but then call if you reraise. Or just call you, regardless of whether or not they have pot odds. I figured that if there is a flush on the board amongst these opponents and you represent that flush, there is a good chance that they will fold.

Let's take a look.

Say you are dealt a hand that has no hearts and 3 other people see the flop that has 3 hearts and a $5 pot. There is a 52% chance that someone has a flush.
http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=8854813&an=&page=&vc=1

(Another interesting article http://www.math.sfu.ca/~alspach/mag80/)

Therefore, I figured that if just 1 or 2 other people see a flop and it is all the same of one suit, there is <50% chance that someone has a flush. If I have been playing reasonably tight and my opponents are folding if they don't have anything, I figure that if I bet $5, and 60% of the time, I win the pot right there this move has positive expectation.

(0.60)*(+$5)= + $3
(0.40)*(-$5)= - $2

A couple of notes:
1. Position doesn't really matter for this play, I don't think. EP then your bet is more believable. LP then it may look like you are stealing.
2. I'd say in 1,000 hands I think I tried this 4-5 times, so we are talking about a situation that doesn't come along all that much.
3. I would guess the more you try this, the more likely you are to get called.
4. It may seem like if you were heads up, it may work more. However, even the dullest villain will know that the heads up you might be making a move.
5. Of course if you have some of that suit in your hand, it increases the chance no one has a flush.
6. If you actually have a non-nut flush, you have to think about this situation differently and you have other considerations, but knowing the chances that someone has a flush is useful
7. If your pot-sized bet doesn't take down the pot, it might be wise to release the hand. Whether or not to fire another, or two more, bullet on turn and/or river requires more analysis.