Intro

Me: Played over a million hands of PLO online. Primary stake is .5/1 and 1/2. Am pushing close to 1000 live hours of PLO. I think I'm pretty strong at PLO overall.

My buddy: Mainly plays live 1/2 and 1/3 live NLHE. Has a crushing hourly at those games and IMO is wasting his time playing there. Limited PLO experience but is very capable.

The offer
I coach my buddy (we will call him Shawn) via online hand reviews and going over HH and fully bankroll him to play PLO. He doesn't like the concept of backing and makeup and all that so we will try an alternative route. I will pay him $20/hr + he gets 5% of his own action to play live PLO.

I also think the concept of traditional backing has its flaws. If I think I can bring him to $25+/hr in live PLO games, this will be +EV for me. He is also a big variance nit and so I've also effectively removed 95% of the variance from his income.

We will negotiate future rates and action when we hit certain volume goals and assess his feeling towards being a PLO grinder.


Games
Starting at live 1/2 PLO with a $5 bring in. Is a 500 cap buy in.

Goal
Get him playing 5/10 equivalent stakes by the end of 2019
Get him increase his volume overall by removing income variance since he's a bit lazy
Get myself to increase my own volume b/c I'm more motivated when I'm doing something along side another person and I'm also pretty lazy in general. I play mostly online.

December was a mostly coaching/online session review and a few warm up sessions. January 2019, the grind really begins. Will update on all results and progress.

Currently we are both in the red this month but its PLO so big swings and big fish getting lucky are commonplace so what are you gonna do. Stop loss at like -20k probably but hopefully doesn't get to that point.

interesting idea, will be intrigued to see how it turns up. Gl guys

December Results

Shawn:
played 5 sessions of 1/2 PLO for a total of 21 hours 46 min

Best session: +829
Worst session: -1818
Overall result: -1227
Hourly since challenge: -$56/hr

Me:
played 4 sessions of 1/2 PLO and 1 session of 5/10 PLO for a total of 22 hours 8 min

Best session: +2481
Worst session: -1120
Overall result +1543
Hourly since challenge: +$69/hr

Thoughts
went over all the stack off spots. Both of us ran fairly bad in all in equity overall. Shawn ran a lot worse than average so i think being only -$1200 is a win. (Basically got it in pre 5 times with AAxx and scooped 0 pots)

December was a nice warm up intro to live PLO for him and he feels pretty good about his position vs the field but thinks his post flop play might be a little lacking. We will do more reviews that cover flop cbetting textures HU vs multiway going forward. I personally will be aiming for 100 hours live in January + 50 hours online as January will be a kind of busy month for me with other RL stuff going on.

January PLO Results

Shawn
Played a mix of 1/2 and 2/5 PLO shot takes at 81 Hours 23 min.
January Profit: +5624
January Hourly: $69.11/hr

Overall Challenge Profit: +4397
Overall Challenge hourly: 42/hr


Me
Played 109 hours and 46 min of PLO
January Profit: +3288
January Hourly: $29/hr

Overall Challenge Profit: +4831
Overall challenge hourly: $36/hr

Thoughts
Shawn had a pretty good January. Volume was a bit weak but confidence is high. I was having a pretty good January until the very last session. Ended up dropping $6k at 5/10 PLO in an awful run bad session which wiped out most of my January profit. I did play a decent amount of NLHE live as well which I don't include in these results and did well there.

February is off to a very slow start as far as live poker goes due to Superbowl and putting more time in the online grind. Needed patriots to win on the moneyline and they came through. Put a significant amount of my ACR roll on it so now I got some more to play PLO with on that site in the future. No more sports betting for me for hopefully the rest of the year.


Hopefully can put in 100 hours in February live as I currently sit at 0 hours played.

Where are these games being played?

Interesting structure, I like it. Obv it depends on the player actually being respectful enough to always treat it like the results matter for him even though it barely does at 5%. That'd be my only worry. 80 hours if this is his only job is def weak though.