lot of good NLHE players also gravitate towards that. it will leave the NL games very passive and weak, more than usual I mean

Yea, when I'm in a room that's running both the NLHE games are *really* soft. One of the new rooms near me has had that situation since it opened and I'm about $55/hr at NLHE there over a meaningless 70 hour sample. But the eye test of the game is great most of the time.

All of the spewy gambler types have migrated from NL to PLO at my local room too. Really making it hard for me to keep pushing off learning/playing it.

you should 100% be learning PLO. I've started playing pretty heavily with all my local live degens in an online club, and everyone is awful. I VPIP 50% and am basically the tightest person playing.

Effectively, most people have gotten OK at NLHE. They know what are good hands and what are bad hands, they have at least some sense of when they're value betting and when they're bluffing, etc. They don't know these things in PLO. I was playing the other day and folded 3376ss after showing the whale next to me. He was shocked that I could fold that hand (or any hand) pre in PLO.

I don't mind the idea of PLO. The game offers a lot more ways for idiots to make really big mistakes. The problem is that everyone shoveling their money in preflop isn't one of them. That's only a marginal mistake since the equities run so close that they end up basically coinflipping with each other for stacks.

The real mistakes come when people chase sucker draws or get freerolled, which requires getting to the flop or turn before the money all ends up in, which means for a $5 bring in game with idiotic preflop action you need $1k+ stacks.

PLO is a lot of fun and there's enough literature out there to get you much better than the spewy types really quickly and easily. It's the vast difference in BR requirements that are the barrier to entry IME. I get into spots where I know if I bought in for $600 I could call off $50 pre and get into a favorable spot, but I can't afford all the BI I need to miss a few times.

Fair enough on the bankroll considerations. I'm a rec player with a good job, so bankroll isn't really a concern for me at any stakes of poker I'm interested in playing. The ability to play without concern for money and to think of poker chips as just round little discs rather than something with monetary value is probably one of my key advantages over a lot of people I play with regularly.

As I detailed in BBV, I lost a $4500 pot in PLO a few weeks ago. We both got it in with Broadway (the nuts() on the turn, I had 9 outs to improve (nut flush or boat), the other guy had 3 (boat), and he binked the river. I was able to brush it off, the other guy would've had to have been done with poker for a while if he lost that hand.

Epic results

Only PLO in my town is 1/2, 5 bring in, uncapped. I buy in once in a blue moon, even the regs in that game play terrible hands, but they can all afford the $100+ to see a flop. Basically it's just when I feel like I can afford a punt.

The money doesn't bother me either. The problem is that I can't reload $2k+ a month if it goes bad, and neither can a LOT of people playing LLSNL.

Even your BBV proves my point. A $4400 pot is 22 BI for a $1/2 game. That's an entire bankroll. It 9 BI at $2/5. PLO games, even with small blinds, play significantly bigger than NLHE games. It's too easy to break players and dry up your pool playing too much PLO in smaller circles.

Dead on. It kills everyone, even the house because it affects the longevity of the NL game.

You need huge wealth to substain it, even if it runs only 1 times a week, it will kill a healthy population very fast, remember kid, greed is bad.

player pool in my area is kinda small and I can easily think of 3 big fishes who took 6+months break last time someone ran a PLO once a week for about a month in my area... and that was just 1 table, one night a week. 500k+- population city.

So you guys are saying PLO is the devil.

Live PLO should probably just be limit preflop (or capped).

Capping it would go against the draw of the game though (pure, unabated action)

Live plo is really simple and most 1/2 & 1/3 dont have the "variance" that people constantly attribute to it. Hand select well, nut peddle, fold non nut / 8 out draws to pot sized bets, bet pot at all times with your value. Its really simple, much more simple than NL for me.

Imagine a NL game where you almost always had great odds pre to call with your pocket pairs, and every single time you flop a set you are able to get stacks in vs a straight draw. That is plo.

I do agree longterm it kills other game formats as well as player population, so it is not good for long term win rate. But short term, the win rate is most certainly higher than NL, and if you cant beat them, join them.

The problem with not being rolled for PLO is that PLO offers pretty much everything that a whale would desire in a poker game.

There's tons of actions so lots of money on the table. Everyone is playing a lot of hands pre, so whale isn't at as much of a disadvantage when he VPIPs 80%. Tons of variance so whale isn't always walking home a loser. You often flop equity so easy to see all five cards and get your hand to the river.

There was one whale in my game who said he didn't like PLO. I was shocked, and told him as much. When he finally tried it he realized he loves it and now every time he sits down he's at least requesting we play rotation.

The BR issue with live PLO is that pretty much everywhere that I've played, the lowest stakes have a $5 bring in and usually play ATLEAST as big as 2/5 NL if not bigger. And with the swings you need to be more rolled than you would for NL, so you almost need To be signif over rolled for 2/5 NL to play 1/2 plo with a $5 bring in. And even if you're a rec player and don't worry about BR, you're swings at the lowest plo game in the room are likely gonna be bigger than 2/5 NL which causes a lot of people to lose an amount of $ that makes them take extended breaks/quit.

There's just no PLO equivalent to 1/2 or 1/3 NL available in live poker.

In my experience plo plays 2 to 2.5x bigger than the same stake NL game

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The nit-pot approach and hand selection are a great topic for another strategy type thread, so I'll leave that off for now.

But you can hold a PLO game down a little bit if you leave a $2 bring in instead of the $5. Keeps the initial open down to $10 and limits the initial pot size unless two guys re-pot each other.

Ideally I'd play $1/1 PLO to be more equivalent to a $1/2 NL ... problem is that it'll never fly with the whales.

These two paragraphs seem to contradict each other. Calling with a PP and hoping to stack off with a set in plo (at least in my game) is lighting money on fire. Bottom set on most boards is a terrible hand, middle set often unappealing as well.

There certainly could be regional differences that will cloud our opinions and cause us to disagree, but my game has frequent 3 betting and MW pots. I can easily see the Sklansky bucks to be made, but saying there's low variance doesn't relate to the games I see.

I dream of a 1/2 5 bring in plo game where everyone has $500 and there are few 3 bets pre. That sounds like fun and profit. But calling 20-30% of my stack pre, or folding and losing my initial 20-30 call, it isn't as much fun as I thought it would be.

You misread my post. Pay attention to bolded.

Flopping a set vs. straight draw is referring to NL, and the comparison being made is an equity comparison, not a literal hand comparison.

As you say pocket pairs, even medium pairs, are generally trash in plo.

But that doesnt mean we arent flopping 65% or even 70% equity, potting, and getting tons of action. (When we flop a pair and the nut flush, pot, and get called by a set. When we flop the nut straight and backdoor flush, pot, and get called by a bare flush draw. When we flop xxxx and get called by lol yyyy. The list goes on forever)

This happens to me at least several times a session. Being able to get a **** ton of money in as a 65/35 multiple times a night decreases variance, it doesnt increase it.

People are constantly talking about how thin equities run in plo but after the first 3 community cards are dealt it aint as thin and its one street at a time. Folks forget that and usually count both turn and river equity when really we are POTTING EACH STREET and getting called by domimated hands that do not have the proper equity to continue.

Straight draw may have been an exaggeration so I will amend my statement to:

Imagine in NL everytime you flopped a set you got it all in vs. a flush draw. That is how equity runs in plo with good hand selection pre and potting your value hands post.

In NLHE, usually you can get two streets of value or more as a 70%+ favorite, even against 3ways.

Overpair vs TPTK OTF is 80/20

TPTK vs TP2K is 85/15

TPTK vs. TP2K and V2 with 30% of hands is 70/14/16

Granted its less $$$, but it would have to be way way more $$$ in PLO to overcome the difference.

E.g., in non-strict terms...
(NL $) * SD(70/14/16 type events) vs. (PLO $) * SD(65/35 type events)

Add to that the fact that you will play many more hands in PLO. (ETA... specifically, you'll play many more hands that are closer to 50/50.)

Add to that the fact that even excellent PLO players will make more mistakes then excellent NL players.

Mostly 1/3 $300 max

Some 2/5 $500-1000 max dependant on location.

I think the fact that you play more hands actually decreases variance also since everyone plays more hands. Essentially you're sample size grows faster.

Very impressive. I've played similar hours (3519) at 1/3 NL $300 max BI but only at 7.3 bb/hr, and my winrate has dropped drastically over the past ~1500 hours.

It's taken me about 7.5 years to reach this; you? I've found my tables have changed a lot over that time. Do you have any observations to make (noticing that it looks like you are currently on a 500 hour breakeven stretch)?

GthanksforpostingG

You guys aren't discussing the need of a far stronger mental game when playing PLO because one can expect to lose multiple buyins easily and regularly despite playing well and end up dumping even more if that puts them on tilt.